Carol’s Column

Property tycoon trauma

"THE property market is surging upwards in leaps and bounds," said the financial brain of the family as he sat in his customary seat at the head of the round table, eating his curds and whey.

"The time is ripe — we must sell the house, we'll make a fortune". That was Saturday a week ago.

"All we need to do is tidy the house and then we'll put it on the market on Monday," said my husband, spreading the marmalade thick over the toast to hide the cracks.

"You're mad," I yelled retrieving my chin from the coffee. "Do you realise how long it will take to tidy this pigsty? Do you realise that if I called in 20 Misses Mopps it would still take the better part of a year?"

On Sunday, I was knee-deep in treasured junkiana tenderly collected over years.

There was the dehydrated, red rose, faded and grey now, from that one, mad night of abandoned passion on our 12th wedding anniversary. There was the champagne cork of our marriage, the one that had exploded joyfully from the bottle and hit the resident rabbi in the eye.

There were the love letters tied with a crimson ribbon, written by my mother imploring me to remember the stewed prunes for breakfast and the chicken soup for lunch and supper.

Best of all, there were mementoes of nappy days long since past.

The bright yellow, plastic bin that had held 10 000 nappies in six years, the four-wheel drive carriage pram, so roomy that we only discarded it when the fourth baby came and it got a little crowded. Besides, Barry who was six and had just begun to talk, was complaining that there wasn't enough legroom for him with the other three in position.

How could I throw anything away?

On Monday, the estate agent, a foghorn-like woman with bronze hair and swiveling head, came to look over the house.

"Of course, it needs repainting," she bellowed as she tripped up the loose carpet on the stairs. A little corner of the ceiling, disturbed by the noise, detached itself and came floating downwards.

We discovered that we were living in a "renovator's dream", an "easy-do-it-up-and-it-will-look-like a-paradise" house that "with not too much effort, could become someone's very comfortable home."

"This is horrible," I said to my husband, as she strode down the rustic garden driveway that "with a little nifty brickwork and plenty of concrete would look like something". "I don't know who she thinks she is?"

We retreated into our "shack with the country air" and made dinner on the "antique coal stove with lots of quaint appeal".

Our musical plumbing acted up again during the evening bath-time session.

"A cold shower's the best possible thing for pepping up the circulation," said my husband as he pulled on his woolly long-johns with the built-in feet. There was a note of defiance in his voice.

At 3 am that night, restless from the jar of pickled gherkins he'd consumed for a midnight snack, he turned over and whispered sweet words into my ear.

"We'll go it alone," he said. "Who needs those vultures anyway?"

For the rest of the week I worked feverishly to turn our house into a viewer's delight on the show day we were having.

The kids pulled finger and threw away all their dirty clothing which left their cupboards pristine-tidy in their emptiness.

Jamie putty-plugged a hole in the downstairs toilet, Barry painted creepers on the outside walls and Ralph borrowed the Rajak's Van Gogh wallhanging to place across the burping cistern in the kitchen, while Nicky took her wheelbarrow down to the Zoo Lake and came back laden with municipality pansies which she planted in strategic places.

I pulled the creeper through the crack in the bedroom wall, painted a false flowerpot at the foot of it and the result was truly stunning.

We removed the lounge and diningroom doors that were too swollen to open or shut and gave the entire living area a delightful open-plan look.

On Thursday, we heard our good friends the Rajaks had sold their house without a show day.

While I was busy stuffing the hole on the upstairs landing with laddered nylon stockings, Betty phoned to tell me a strange man had knocked on the door, asked to look around the house, pulled a cheque book from underneath his flowing white robe and written out an extraordinary cheque for simply millions.

"His name is not familiar," she said. "Sheik Jasmak or something, I can't really read his signature."

Not a member of our congregation, I observed to myself bitterly as I replaced the receiver.

On Friday morning I placed an ad in the paper for an affluent Arab but received no replies.

By Saturday, the house was unrecognisable. There wasn't a smelly tackie to be seen.

We'd moved the hounds, the kitten, the rabbits, the hamsters and the budgie into a residential hotel down the road and manicured the flower beds. Dog droppings had been buried in the compost heap which Ralph sprayed with Diorella and the house looked good enough to live in. Which was out of the question.

On Saturday night we camped on the lawn and ate take-away food from disposable containers which we threw into the neighbours dustbins, ours having been polished only that morning.

Early on Sunday, we popped down to the Zoo Lake for a wash and then lined ourselves up decoratively on the front lawn.

"Look natural," growled my husband as the first viewers arrived.

They poured through the house, flat feet by the hundreds. By teatime, my voice was cracked. Barry's had gone completely.

"I'm tired of walking into every room where there are people and saying 'Wow — what a house' at the top of my voice," he scribbled on a notepad.

It went quite well considering that Jamie had unfortunately totally blocked the toilet with putty when he'd stopped the hole and the overflow from the bowl had washed away the do-it-yourself stick-down tiles in that small room.

The lights only fused 24 times and the coal stove started smoking when Ralph mistakenly stuffed the flue with a dirty dishcloth he was tidying away.

By 8 pm we had two interested buyers fighting it out in the lounge.

We rigged up a ring and sold seats to our friends at discount prices which paid for the original advertisement in the paper.

While we wait for the winner to recover from his bout, we have, like our friends the Rajaks, rented a container and are busy having it fitted out with windows and a septic toilet.

"You see, this is the way to make money," said my husband last night, as he moved the sleeping bag into his section of the container. "By the way, I saw a super house in Saxonwold, a little pricey, but rather quaint. I thought we'd have a look at it tomorrow."

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