Burying Saint Joseph

Our house is for sale. During one week in October we touched up the paint on a few walls, bought some plants for the front porch and uncluttered. Well, somewhat. You see, the upstairs “landing” is a working art studio, with paints and canvasses and quite a few works in progress. And yes, it tends to be messy. My husband and I share the tiny office downstairs, where we both do lots of writing. And lots of not filing things. And then there’s another upstairs bedroom into which I dumped boxes of stuff when I cleaned out my mother’s house and moved her into an assisted living apartment in 2006. I set up a card table for managing her finances and not filing her paperwork. Real Life is messy.

We have a contingency offer on another house—where we hope to live Real but Less Messy lives—so we handed our keys over to a Realtor and left the country (literally) for two weeks.

When we got home, I asked our Realtor for feedback from another agent who showed our house. Here’s what she said:

Hard to see past all the “icons.”  (How do you tell people that the stuff that is their business is distracting?)

Yes, I’ve read the articles about staging.  I know the philosophy behind getting rid of all your personal stuff so that potential buyers can see themselves living in your house. I get all that. And yes, I’ve found myself distracted, looking at other people’s homes and wanting to know more about the people in the family photographs on the walls than about the walls themselves. But I also enjoy absorbing a bit of each home’s ethos… the human essence that makes it feel like Real People live within its walls.

I also know, from experience, that it often takes twelve to eighteen months to sell a house, and personally, I’m not willing to put my life on hold and live in a museum for that duration. Which brings me to Saint Joseph. The tradition of burying a statue of Saint Joseph to help sell a home isn’t anything new. I’d heard about it over the years, but it wasn’t until I began to research staging that I discovered the booming cottage industry it has become. There’s a book out now, St. Joseph, My Real Estate Agent: Why the Patron Saint of Home Life is the Patron Saint of Home-Selling. The author, Stephen J. Binz, includes prayer services for selling a house and claims the practice is not a superstition.