Since the home I’d planned to have an open house on today managed to get sold right away, I cancelled my public open house and decided to get some much needed work done. There were several early morning appointments and phone calls to make, so from around 10:00 am until around 5:30 this afternoon I was in near non-stop motion. With having been faced with getting my mother’s home cleared out and hopefully ready for the open market more sooner than later, my sister and I did a great deal of moving out some of the bigger furniture and delivering to respective locations. I must mention, some of those better built mid-century bedroom sets are exceptionally heavy. One of my mother’s sets was just as heavy and possibly more. I was told today that in the large metro areas, the better made 1950’s furniture sells very well to the young professionals. Even a small walnut desk I thought I’d move by myself was a struggle with even all the drawers out. There’s much to be said about our older furniture compared to what’s being sold today. I was at one of the big box stores some months ago and happened to look at a few of the clothes chests they were selling. All I could say about that experience was, “Cheap looking and cheaply built.” I think most of them were made from nothing more than particle board and plastic wood-grained coverings. Too many people think that just because something is new, it must be better. As far as I’m concerned nearly nothing new is better unless it was created in an old fashioned way, and that means having been quality built to last long past the “planned obsolescence” that was determined in some company’s smoke-filled company board room.
I’m making another trek up to Forest City again tomorrow to show a few more homes to my anxious yet discriminative buyer. It really is quite amazing sometimes when people think they have someone cornered because of a deadline and thinking, “We’ve got em now because they have to buy our house!” I’ve always instructed both buyers and sellers to never allow themselves to feel as though they’re in a position of pressure. When under pressure, most people cave and regret their actions. Each and every time save a very few in my life, whenever I’ve been pressured into doing either this or that, I simply walk away or say, “I’ll think about it and give you a call tomorrow.” Caving under pressure to do things against one’s inner beliefs borders on sinful. This is why I sometimes most strongly give my opinion on situations, but in the end, walk away leaving everyone to make their own decisions. Why do I give sometimes hard opinions you say? Well I’ve learned over these long years of interacting on the business side with the general public, is because if I don’t speak my mind for better or worse at that moment in time, it’ll certainly come back to haunt me more sooner than later.
A number of the most disturbing sights I’ve been seeing these past two weeks have been exceptionally overweight young people around our City. Whenever I’ve spoken about the difference to long term clients about being “thick” versus overweight is when remembering my mother’s old people. All of her aunts along with her mother were big boned and exceptionally big busted. The difference appearing now versus then, are seeing people freely walking thru the gates of sloth. Genetic pre-disposition and laziness are worlds apart. Those big-busted women of my old family were our very much quiet non-stop workers who made many great things happen on their terms all their lives. My mother’s mother never considered herself fat but only big boned and big busted. She loved meat along with all the other things her doctor said she mustn’t eat or drink when elderly. Well, she ate and drank what she wanted until her ripe old age of 91 and died most painlessly as an invisible feather falling to the floor. Go figure. The above photo was taken prior to her marrying my grandfather.
