Moving stories of title deeds as house vendors use every trick in the book

SPRING is sprung; the daffs are up.

So, too, is the property market. Maybe it’s time to put your dwelling up for sale. And just before you do so, it’s certainly time to take the dirty books off your shelves.

You heard me. You don’t think any decent buyer is going to pay a good price for your dwelling if they realise you read bodice-rippers or worse?

I’ve been paying attention to my own bookshelves in the last few weeks as if I was going to sell the house wherein they live.

Now, the fact is that the rise in the property market hasn’t noticeably affected where I live. In addition, nobody in their right minds would buy a battered, leaking Martello Tower from us.

But when I read the stories of houses that were expected to sell for €180,000 selling for €250,000 instead, the longing comes on me. I think it’s a sort of reverse nesting syndrome; a promised freedom based on never having to fix anything in this particular house but abandon it all and simply move on to pastures new.

The list of things to be fixed gets longer and longer. That’s partly because I’m a list-maker by nature, but it’s also because none of the items is progressing. They’re all important, but none are life-threatening.

So none of them gets done. As long as the flaw is not likely to engulf the man in my life in flames, toss him downstairs on his head, or cut him in two, it can wait until our finances improve.

The man in my life, on the other hand, has no idea of my worst-case scenario disasters threatening him. He just demands action on whatever is currently annoying him, regardless of its affordability.

“The veneer has come up off that unit in the bathroom,” he will announce, adding a statement of impressive passivity. “That should be fixed.”

When I say to him that the leak from the roof afflicting the bathroom might need to be fixed first, because that’s why the veneer is losing its grip, he looks reproachfully impatient: He’s working on the big picture, I shouldn’t be annoying him with minutiae.

Minutiae are what you get when you live in an old home that you open to the public on a Saturday and Sunday morning.

Once you do that, an insurance man arrives who has the look of the Revenue crossed with CAB about him. The guy is only in the door when he spots something he clearly interprets as an incompetent attempt at crime. The most recent one looked at our lift as if it would explode.

Because I can’t manage a spiral staircase when carrying laundry or computers or any one of the million things that need to go upstairs on any given day, we put in a small simple lift and had been happily using it for two years before the insurance guy arrived and had a conniption at the very thought of it.

The first thing he demanded was that the play-pen metal enclosure around the person who travels in it be electrified, so that if anybody accidentally opened the gate while the lift was in flight, so to speak, everything would stop dead.

He also wanted extra redundancy. “Extra redundancy” is insurance-speak for “to be sure to be sure”.

It means having two or three safety measures where one would keep you perfectly safe. So we had to get two things like handbags with cords coming out of them that work like car safety belts.

If the main cable snaps, your life gets saved by these two hanging handbags. In addition, he made us put in perspex so that if the cable snapped, the ends of it wouldn’t take the face off us or off the visitors. All necessary.

All good. All expensive.

SO, as the daffodils start bobbing their bright, modest heads and the first visitors start to arrive, I get these mad notions of selling the whole kit and kaboodle. The notions are mad because of negative equity, but I still think about baking bread in order to fill the tower with the seductive smell which apparently adds thousands to the value of any premises.

If I was serious about it, I would also have to do a bookshelf-cull.

A British presenter of property programmes, named Sarah Beeny, says that while suffusing your home with the smell of baking bread and painting it up to look good can help in getting a good price, an overlooked factor which can turn your house into a winner or loser is the contents of your bookshelves.

Hardback classics by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the Bronte sisters add character to a house, she suggests, and look particularly good on shelves.

According to Ms Beeny, if your home has bookshelves, visitors are always going to check out what’s on them.

“Few can resist a quick peek at the spines on a bookcase and making pretty bold generalisations,” she says. “So when it comes to selling your house, have a very good think about what books you want to display. They can be a great icebreaker for prospective buyers, but beware of over-sharing by displaying books that really should be confined to the bedroom drawer.”

Well, who’d have thought? Any time I go into anybody else’s house, never mind wanting to buy it, I do look out for bookshelves and feel slightly safer in a house that has bookshelves, never mind what’s on those shelves.

The next step all book lovers take is to put their head sideways to facilitate examination of spines. But it’s a social instinct, rather than a judgemental one. You turn sideways in order to spot familiar titles or authors, which would create instant commonality with the house-owner.

“Oh, you’re a Jack Reacher fan too,” or “wonderful to meet someone else who loves Maeve Brennan”.

I love it when people visiting my house do that, and always keep a spare copy of any book that’s particularly special to me, because if someone wants to borrow, say, Flowers for Algernon, I can give it to them happy in the knowledge that they won’t bring it back, since book borrowers (with the single exception of Gay Byrne) never do.

But I’ve never thought that judgements would be made about me or my premises, based on the books on my shelves.

However, that’s what Sarah Beeny maintains is what happens. She says novels such as 50 Shades of Grey should be stashed out of sight, as should volumes on taxidermy or witchcraft.

Now, there is an argument for stashing books such as 50 Shades of Grey out of sight at any time, preferably in the wheelie bin, so as not to lower the tone of the place, but how a volume about stuffing dead parrots reflects on a home escapes me.

Removing witchcraft books does make some sense, though. Nobody ever wants to buy a house from the kind of person who might leave a working poltergeist behind them.