Selling Murder House

Chapter 1

I could see Saddlebrook from my apartment's bedroom window; its stone and brick facades, its iron gates, its winding roads and stately, ancient oak trees. From there, looking down on it from my sixth-floor unit, it all looked devastatingly close. Sometimes, when I had the window open, I could even hear it; luxury car doors shutting, dogs barking, kids shrieking with glee as they scurry across freshly-mown grass.

Today, though, the window was closed. It was a dark, gloomy morning, the kind of weather that almost certainly equates to a headache. Clouds hung low, blanketing over Saddlebrook's roofs so that if I squinted, the whole neighborhood looked like it could have just floated in from some other world. I winced as I pushed myself upright in bed.

I checked my phone, but I already knew what time it was. I was one of those people blessed with an internal clock. No matter how late I went to bed — and last night it had been late — I always woke up just around 6:45 a.m.

A lot of things about me were like that — internal. I was 25 years old and was already in my dream career, and none of that motivation came externally. My parents would have been happy enough to see me work my way up to assistant manager at Kohl's, and no amount of money could've convinced me to go into finance or engineering or whatever career draws the money-motivated types. No judgement on them — honestly — more power to them, probably literally. That's just not the way I function, which can sometimes get me into trouble. When you're internally motivated, it's almost impossible to do anything you don't want to do. I've tried to work past it, I honestly have, but every time it's like trudging up a down escalator in platform heels. The flip-side is that doing anything I love is like riding on the best drug in the world — It's all I want to do, all I want to think about, all I want to talk about.

That's the other thing that's internal — literally. I work as an interior designer for a real estate brokerage. It's what had me up until the crack of dawn the night before. I was working on staging an open house, and the art pieces that arrived at the house were not the ones I hand-selected. I could have let it go, but I had a vision for that house that I wasn't going to forfeit. By the time I had my art, it was well past sunset and I sent hours running around the house, working up a sweat, and placing each piece in its perfect spot.

It's not a glamorous job by any means, half the time I'm working in stretchy leggings and cropped t-shirts with sweat stains down the back, but I do get to work with incredibly glamorous people, inside incredibly glamorous homes. It's a boutique brokerage, with only a handful of agents and even fewer supporting staff, and they specialize in selling multi-million dollar homes. So you can see how I might be working a sweat hauling 80-pound museum-grade paintings up and down three sets of curved staircases.

Most of the homes the brokerage works with are new-construction, ultra-modern, all white marble and stainless steel. They sell for millions, and they sell fast. The clientele are the kind of people with outrageously busy schedules, yet still seem to have a stockpile of hours set aside for scrutinizing new homes every year or so. They all pretty much request the same thing: "open concept," "clean lines," "hard floors," "white kitchen." What they're actually looking for, but don't know how to say, is an entirely different story.

Everyone says they want clean, fresh, open -- whatever the new HGTV buzzword is -- something they can make entirely their own, with no influence from the ghosts of homeowners' past. The truth is, no matter how high the ceilings are, or how much natural light the space gets, these houses are cold, empty shells.

That's where I come in -- because in reality, the only thing scarier than touring a haunted house, is touring an empty one, so devoid of color, of texture, of life that you can't even consider it habitable. Staging these homes is like filling a void, bringing it life and light and energy. It gives potential buyers a little window into their new oasis, and it gives our sellers a whole lot of extra cash to work with toward their next home.