Appraised

We're refinancing our house, which means we have to act like adults and try to do things like understand how mortgage loans actually work.* Today an appraiser came to the house, and yesterday I cheerfully web-searched "how to prepare for an appraisal" and was horrified by what the interwebs said I should have done to prepare. I took a look around the house, pretending to be a stranger, and realized that the list of things that we should have done in the last two years is very, very long. We should have replaced all the crappy fake gold fixtures, for starters, and all the other stuff (medicine cabinet, I'm talking to you) that signals that a 90-year-old Croatian man** owns this house. We should have replaced the ugly, battered linoleum in the mudroom. We should have painted the trim in the dining room. We should have painted the porch. We should at least have cleaned the mildew off the porch. We should have gussied up the concrete pad in the backyard to give it an attitude of "patio" rather than "concrete pad." We should have washed the windows - not just recently, but EVER.*** Thank goodness for visits by handy houseguests, without whose efforts the house would look much scrappier.



*There is nothing in my life experience that has so deeply undermined my confidence in my own intelligence.
** He lived in the house, first with his parents and then alone, for 50 years. They liked things to be fake gold.
*** This is the most embarrassing omission. It's just... I don't know, it takes so much time. Time I could be spending watching tv! Or napping!