om early this morning until long after the sun went down I seemed to be a half step back from where I wanted to be. In thinking there would be enough time at my public open for me to get caught up with the phone calls I needed to return, I found just enough people in attendance to be kept from getting them finished. I was quickly reminded this morning of our season of the year with the dear hopping about like giant jack rabbits in and around the break of dawn. It’s too bad they’ve become so acclimated to cars and humans in our City to where they’re becoming almost defiant by running out in front of traffic and likely in belief everyone will slow or stop for them. Of course their country counterparts don’t even have an opportunity to learn the hard way when running in front of and 18 wheeler moving at 55 – 70 miles an hour. Being hit at that speed by something that big must certainly mean a death about as quick as flipping a light switch.
I was busy showing homes all morning and was disappointed by how many of them were really not up to speed in being clean and appropriately priced. I know it’s not the animal’s fault whenever I find lingering odors from cats and dogs. Pets are just like children in their care and maintenance on a daily basis. I’m allergic to cats but it really doesn’t bother me being around felines as long as their owner takes good care of them. But, if there’s an inside pussy and the owner doesn’t keep the home clean and well vacuumed, there’s an overload of dander and dried saliva particles which become airborne. My nose was running on two different occasions while out with my customers. The real annoyance is when people have those overpowering plug-in room fresheners in nearly every room. While in one of the homes today, both my buyer and myself were getting half dizzy from the aromatic overload. Whenever walking down an aisle in a grocery store where those things are located, they cause me to shuffle on by all the more quickly. I said to the buyer, “Why is it people don’t go back to the basics by using more of the old fashioned cleaners like vinegar, soda, ammonia, and Murphy’s Oil Soap. Nearly any type of hard surface floor looks fantastic after using the Murphy’s concentrate with warm water. I showed a new tenant yesterday a bottle of the concentrate and said, “Use this on the wooden floors in your apartment and they will look far better than anything else you’d use on them when cleaning.” I hope that message stuck and he remembers when it comes time to clean. Vinegar is as well fantastic on stainless steel.
For whatever reason, I’ve been finding myself at odds with clients/customers when attempting to explain given situations. I’ll give an example. When showing a home about a week ago, I made a great effort to explain a step by step process in how that given home could look if one wanted to get it back on a value track. After all the time I wasted in my explanation, the buyer said, “It just looks like way more work than I could possibly handle.” Keeping a bit of a poker face I said, “Well, I guess we need to move on to something that’s more move-in ready.”
What bothered me the most was I felt I had failed in getting that person to not only see, but to understand that the project would not be so expensive to where the personal time spent would far exceed the minimal costs. Another more recent incident happened when I was trying to describe to a builder what I believed was possible easy fix on a structural problem in a home. He actually said, “I’d have to run your idea past my architect.” It shocked me to hear such a response from a seasoned builder. There’s too many people running around that seem to have lost their ability to think “out of the box”. This is certainly a by-product of our age of specialization. The downside of it all is that we’ve created crowds of people suffering from conceptual discord. I’m finding it harder to invoke a mental picture for someone to where we find ourselves on the same page.
