They say cameras never lie, but we all know they do, almost every single time. And I’m not just talking about PhotoShop. Everybody knows that cameras “add 10 pounds.” Different lenses produce vastly different images. By the age of ten, or probably younger, kids know what selfie angles are the most flattering.
There are people who make a living by convincing cameras to lie — those who photograph models, for example, or those who capture the colors of a sunset many of us never see in real life. But there’s another master of the lens; people who can capture the best in every picture they take, hide the flaws, and present every subject’s best side.
Those people are called realtors.
Over the past week, Susan and I looked at several houses currently on the market. We weren’t looking looking, merely looking. Some of the houses we looked at were smaller than our current home, while others were bigger. A couple were on larger tracts of land, while others were wedged shoulder-to-shoulder in neighborhoods. The one thing each of them had in common was that before we drove out to visit them in person, we looked at pictures, online.
One we looked at was a monster of a house — 5,600 square feet in a gated community with a swimming pool in the backyard, access to a private pond, and a thirty-second walk from Lake Overholser.
The pictures go on to show a total of twelve rooms, but didn’t mention that the house was three stories. The den/movie room, located on the third floor, was 80 degrees (it was only slightly warmer than that outside). The pictures of the bedrooms conveniently cropped out the wallpaper from the 70s, which was a confusing design choice for a house built in the 90s. There were so many nails in the walls that didn’t show in the pictures that Susan wondered if the pictures hadn’t been digitally altered. None of the torn windows screens, water-damaged wood, broken bricks, wires hanging from the ceiling where the previous owner had removed light fixtures, or carpet stains appear in the photos, either. The master bedroom was particularly disappointing. After looking back at the photos, it appears it was staged with a double bed just to make the room look bigger.
Oh, and those pictures of the pool? They were taken last year. The pool hasn’t been opened this year, and we were afraid to look underneath the tarp to see what it was hiding.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” I told Susan on the way back to our car, “but I wouldn’t trade our house straight across for that one.”
It sure looked nice in the pictures, though.
Wednesday after work, we looked at another house — a historical home in downtown Yukon. If you love history and heritage, boy, was this the house for you. It was built in the 1920s, and still decorated like it. It was the first house in Yukon to have an attached garage, according to the realtor. The main sitting room included a small balcony where Czech royalty stood almost a hundred years ago to have their pictures taken.
The house was beautiful, and as we walked through it I was whisked back a hundred years. I imagined Susan and I sitting in front of the fireplace, sipping on tea and looking out the window.
Gorgeous, right? But here’s what the pictures didn’t show. They didn’t show the homeless-looking guy who walked back and forth on the sidewalk, stopping to stare at us. They didn’t show the neighbor who, the entire time we were there, was cutting wood on his table saw in the driveway.
“What did you think of the house?”
“WwwwrrrrrrrrrEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
“What?”
Most significantly, the photos didn’t show the smell of cat urine, which was so pungent in the basement that I could smell it for hours. I didn’t say anything, but with my eyes watering and Morgan holding her nose, the realtor felt obligated to address it. “There’s a bit of an odor down here,” she said in the understatement of the century. I’d rather eat lunch inside the old pachyderm building at the zoo rather than spend another second in that basement. The owner had tried to cover up the smell with bleach, which made for two offensive smells instead of one.
Several times in the past we have looked at homes for sale online, only to have them sell before we had a chance to visit them in person. More than once, I’ve been convinced we let the perfect home slip through our fingers. After seeing the disparity between the photos we saw this week compared to the actual houses, I won’t think that way again.