open houses are for snooping

how cluttered is your basement?

Sometimes, it’s not only polite to look into people’s cupboards and check out their basements, it’s encouraged.

Fun fact:

I love real estate.

Open houses are my jam. Weekend afternoons in Toronto featured endless opportunities to discover humans. At every open house, I would head straight for the basement. Dry basements excite me. They were one of the best places one could find clues about the people living there.

I spent hours snooping through other peoples homes. Well… Occasionally we snooped through homes that people ACTUALLY lived in. Most of the time though? They were staged.

Three children under ten years old, and they both work sixty hours a week? Pffftt… They may subscribe to ‘Dwell’ magazine. But nobody with that kind of life is this tidy. No way. Where are the O’s? Where are the fishy crackers? Where are the toys?
Dirty little liars!

Us - On any given Sunday

But in real estate, pretense pays. When we sold in Toronto, everything was cleared away. There were no postcards on the fr…