Last summer I fell down a rabbit hole into the topsy-turvy world of Unreal Estate. It would be more accurate to say I jumped down the rabbit hole. It was sudden and impulsive but it had been a long time coming. And, appropriately for a librarian, it all happened because of a bookcase. Let me explain.
My daughter is a nurse who works with the elderly. She has seen her share of falls or sudden illness crushing a senior’s quality of life. A three storied house with steep stairs was no place for us as we aged she insisted, and we resisted. Every now and again she would send me a listing for a house for sale in Foxfield Village, a senior community near her home in Middletown. It would be perfect, she claimed, single level living and so near the grandchildren.
Quite an inducement. But there was always something wrong with the house. One seemed quite nice on the inside but the yard was a blank expanse of lawn, front and back. Not a twig or a leaf of any kind to be seen. How could I leave my garden full of flowering trees and shrubs and perennials for this sad bleak plot? There was always something. We had upgraded to stainless appliances, how could we go back to old white ones? My younger self would be appalled at my design snobbery. But I admit to it. We don’t always become better people as we age.
Then one Thursday last August she sent a listing that seemed to check all the boxes. Small but pretty garden, stainless appliances, and a glass enclosed porch, perfect for my heat and insect intolerance. There was just one problem. The open plan living space didn’t seem to have a wall long enough for my bookcase. I pored over the photos in search of an angle that would show a wall. None appeared. This was a nonnegotiable.
I’ve developed a perhaps unhealthy attachment to my bookcase over the years. You might think it must be a family heirloom, expensive designer furniture, or precious antique. But it was a found object, abandoned by the previous owners of the house we bought in 1988. It sat in the family room, an awkward ugly hulk too heavy to easily move. No wonder they left it behind. We used it as is for a few years, handy for children’s toys and the detritus of family life. Then one year we redecorated our living room, fresh paint and a new couch and rug. The old Scandinavian bookcase with warped shelves didn’t fit very well with the new look. I got an idea. What if I painted the unit in the family room and replaced the hardware on the drawers? Well that was all it took to turn an ugly duckling into a classic looking piece worthy of my book collection. For the next thirty years it took pride of place as the focal point of my living room and I grew to love it. If we were going to move it had to come with us!
We decided to go and look at the house just to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood. I warned the agent that we were not serious buyers as the house had no place for my bookcase. On Saturday morning we drove up to Middletown and turned onto Keller Lane, a cul-de-sac of small neat houses in Foxfield Village. We met Agent S in the driveway and commenced our tour. The house had everything we needed, even a large finished basement and double garage so my husband wouldn’t have to get rid of any of his “stuff.” But the photos were correct – there was no wall for my bookcase. S, however, turned out to be a savvy agent. “Well you could build a wall here,” he said, pointing to an opening in the living room leading to a hallway. We saw at once that the opening wasn’t necessary, it just made a short cut from the living room to the bedroom. The house was small, easy to get to the bedroom via the front hall. That clinched it. By Monday we had a contract on our new home.
That turned out to be the easy part. Now we had to sell our house in Montgomery Village. Houses in our neighborhood were usually snapped up within days so we had no worries. But we were about to learn the fickle nature of the real estate business. The very day our house went on the market real estate plummeted into a black hole. Suddenly no one was buying, or even viewing. There are only three words a seller wants to hear from their agent: “offer” and “bidding war.” But we heard gnomic explanations. Uncertainty about the election was Agent A’s diagnosis. Half the nation expected armageddon if Trump won and the other half expected armageddon if Harris won. That added up to 100% of the population expecting armageddon! No time to buy a house. After the election, what now? Armageddon was surely only weeks away! We were befuddled by the arcane language of agent-speak, like trying to decipher ancient runes. During one Open House Agent A cheerily texted “Lots of activity here today!” Wow, did that mean a bidding war by eager buyers? My daughter suggested a different translation. “Three dog walkers glanced at the house as they passed, one dog relieved himself under the For Sale sign.”
We were discouraged, but Agent A plugged away tirelessly, a veteran of the vicissitudes of Unreal Estate. I spent the anxious fall days driving up and down I270 supervising wall building in Middletown and “staging” my house for potential buyers in Montgomery Village. I followed Agent A’s instructions: remove all family photos, get rid of clutter (that meant clearing out my husband’s office and garage; his stuff transported to his new basement lair), no more than three objects on any surface, nothing on the kitchen counters, fresh flowers everywhere. I didn’t even balk when he moved a favorite armchair to the garage – “it interrupts the flow.” But on one thing I was immovable. We were not going to spend money on removing the wallpaper! It was classic and classy in a Laura Ashley kind of way. Not garish, in my opinion. But in Unreal Estate wallpaper is an abomination to be expunged forever from the earth.
At the end of October we moved to Foxfield Village, our old house still unsold. It looked sad and abandoned with all our nice things removed. I relented. We paid a ridiculous sum to have all the wallpaper stripped and the entire house painted a boring neutral shade. Now it didn’t look like my house at all so there were no pangs of sadness on leaving it behind. It was a characterless empty shell. I wondered who would want it now.
But one person’s bland shell is another’s blank canvas on which to paint their own style. The new look didn’t work right away but on New Year’s Day we heard the magic word OFFER! Our adventures in Unreal Estate came to a happy conclusion on February 4th 2025. I like to imagine the new owners hanging garish wallpaper in every room!
As for my bookcase, it made the move to the new house with just a few scratches to the paint, easily repaired. It looks handsome against the new wall. Even my skeptical family agree the wall looks as though it was always there.
The first time we went for a walk in Foxfield Village we saw a magnificent fox ahead of us on the trail. He stopped, stared, and seemed to make eye contact before casually sauntering off into the trees. We felt welcomed to the neighborhood.
Dispatches From the Former New World 