Cultural Values
Things I find sad…
We met with the Realtors today for the "wow we have a lot of crap to do to get our house ready to sell" talk. After deciding that the crosses in our dining room are decorative and not religious (and therefore didn't need to be removed), they started debating if we had too many books and if that made our house look cluttered (we had already boxed up 75% of our books). They ended up deciding that having our bookshelves along the living room wall was a good thing because it could "help potential buyers envision a large screen plasma TV there."
Oh and we were also told to remove all visible Compact Fluorescent lightbulbs because they aren't "aesthetically pleasing."
The joys of appealing to the lowest common cultural denominator…
julieclawson(at)gmail(dot)com 
Are you going to take their suggestions?
And you will follow this advice because…?
Ugh. I hear ya. My parents moved houses last April (while I was living with them at the time), so I was a part of the whole "our house has to look artificially pretty and not like people actually live here" phase. Most of our books had to come down, too. The worst part is that Mom took the "prettier" ones–like my Nestle-Aland Greek NT and Liddell-Scott–put them horizontal on the bookshelf and stuck fake potted greenery on top of it. The most unkindest cut indeed. Fortunately our house sold fast…I hope that can be the case for y'all as well.
We're in the midst of selling a house, so we're watching the house selling shows on HGTV and talking to our realtor about how to make our house pleasing to the potential buyers. I'm convinced that the "conventional wisdom" on how to prepare your house for buyers is hog wash.
I've never been turned off by pictures of other people's families (actually, when we bought the house we're trying to sell, they had pictures everywhere) or by furniture that didn't fit my "style."
Garish colors can be a turn-off because it's one more thing to paint. Clutter makes a room look small. But neat bookshelves? I can't see that as a turn-off.
Good luck to y'all!
Good luck with the sale, Julie. I have to admit that I liked the look of our de-cluttered house (well, I could have stood a few family pics on the walls) when we were selling. The only good thing about packing away most of your belongings is that when you finally unpack them you'll have a better idea of what you can live without (which I'm guessing in my case will be something more than half).
Oh I'm happy about the "pack away the clutter" part and seriously hope that some of those boxes get lost in the move. We have way too much stuff and are a bit at odds regarding what we can give away. But I also don't want to make the house sterile either. We'll follow most of the suggestions, but don't want to compromise everyday life either.
Wow, that is hilarious to me for some reason.
Maybe you should buy a plasma tv just to help sell the place…
'lowest common cultural denominator' comes across as a little elitist…
sorry, that was an unfair comment i just made.