WRY BREAD: A Slice of My Life in Pursuit of Dough

How Do You Put a Price on the House You Grew Up In?

By Gail Harlow

       There is a house that resides in my memory. It’s made up of rooms from the various houses of my past.  If I’m very still and silence the chatter in my mind, I can hear the rough-and-tumble sounds of a family growing up in that house of memories; the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen, where my mother still cooks; my father whistling to the marching-band music he loves as he walks through the house,  jarring me and my two brothers out of a sound sleep in the morning.  I can hear the squawk of my mother’s parrot, Tony, who demanded more attention from her than we ever did as infants; my brothers arguing over something or other; the sounds of our dogs barking.

       I see the reflection of my teen-age self, as I stand in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, trying on dresses, like personalities, and wondering if I am attractive. There, in another bedroom, I see a younger version of myself hunched over a desk, doing my homework. I see my father sitting at the massive Salvation Army desk in his office late at night, paying the bills.

       I see my parents dressed to the nines, my mother in black lace and satin heels, trailing the sweet scent of Arpege behind her, my father in a black tux and cummerbund, smoking a cigar, showing off for us before they leave for their annual New Year’s Eve party. I see myself sitting at the top of the stairs leading down into the Bavarian-style bar that my mother created in the basement of every house we ever lived in, where she and my father would hold fabulous parties. I’m eavesdropping on the chatter, the guests’ tongues loosened by the perfect Manhattans my father mixed, and wondering if I’ll ever comprehend the mysteries of sex and money and adulthood.

       I see the garden of this house, lovingly tended, over the years, by my mother—her daffodils and irises and peonies and gooseberry bushes thriving. I see the little painted metal sign that my father gave her, which she stuck in the ground under a birdbath. Its message:  “Old gardeners never die. They just lose their bloomers.” My mother lost her bloomers two years ago today.

       As her eldest, I was the executor of my mother’s estate and in charge of the sale of the house, which was her major asset (my father had died eight years earlier). My brothers and I finally sold this house, which we grew up in and our mother died in, six months ago. It took us a year and a half and cost us thousands of dollars in expenses to maintain during that time. My mistake was confusing that aging house, with its creaking floors and faulty plumbing, with the warm, safe, solid home of my youth.

       Even though the real estate agent—a friend of my mother’s who had spent many evenings enjoying my parents’ hospitality in the Bavarian bar in the basement of that house—counseled me to lower my price, I initially asked 40 thousand dollars more than the price at which the house eventually sold.  In setting a value on the house, I was seeing it through my mother’s eyes and the rose-tinted glasses of my memories. (I think now that she would have been smarter—more realistic—than I.)

       I’m not alone in making the mistake of letting emotions distort the value of a family residence when it is put on the market after a death in the family. The other common mistake, which can work against a quick sale, is the reluctance of family members to deal with the disposal of the contents: who gets the silver, the furniture, the paintings, the piano, and who will deal with the painful task of emptying closets of clothes that still smell faintly of the departed? Because the three of us live in different states, it took us nearly a year to empty my mother’s house. After we’d all taken what we wanted, we hired a company to bid on the remains and strip the house of everything that was left. My mother’s cherished Rosenthal now lives in my china cupboard; the gold-painted cherub that she adored is perched atop the cupboard, watching over me. And my mother’s Arpege, which clung to the clothes in her closet, is a sense memory that will haunt me forever.

       Because of the money the delay cost us, I wish now that I had been more objective in pricing the house—I wish I had listened to the realtor’s advice—and I write this hoping that others will do as I say, not as I did. But I know that for anyone facing this situation, the reluctance to let go is a phase in the grieving process that gives some comfort. What I’ve learned is that selling the house—giving up the tangible evidence of my parents’ lives—didn’t mean that I was letting go of them. The memories (and they aren’t all happy—whose are?) live on, becoming richer and more complex as time passes. After the house was emptied and priced nearer to what the market would bear, the offers came. We found that what the experts say is true: houses do sell more quickly if they are fairly priced, clean and empty, and prospective owners can imagine making their own memories in the once-crowded spaces.

       The other day, I asked my brother whether he’d heard anything about how the family who bought our mother’s house was doing. He still stays in touch with friends from the old neighborhood, so I knew chances were good he’d have heard something about them. I wasn’t so much interested in news of the new residents. I wanted to know how the house was doing.

       He told me he’d heard that the new owners park their cars and a boat on my mother’s once-manicured lawn. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked the question. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the house of many rooms in my memory is where my parents live now. The lawn is green, the house has a new paint job, and, oh, the parties they hold there.

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Gail Harlow is the Founding Editor of MAKING BREAD Magazine.

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