Dream House Awakenings

"It was an unusual system, to say the least," Elinor Sachse said.

The Sachses thought they knew what they were getting into, however. They checked the electric bills and found that the current owners, an English couple with several children, were paying Pepco $99 a month on an installment plan that averaged the usage over a year's time. Steep for 1976, but doable.

Two months later a bill for $670 dollars arrived. "There's a big difference in how the English tolerate cold," she said.

What the Sachses found out, too late, was that the sellers ran those electric heaters only five or so hours a day. "The children had a rule that they were not allowed to turn on the heat until everyone was home, meaning they were anxious not to be in the house in the afternoon."

And did the wooden house have insulation? "Oh good God. There weren't even storm windows -- and not one window is square, which meant custom storms," she said. "We didn't ask the right questions. If we had known about the previous owner's pattern of living, their lifestyle, we would have known we were in for problems."

Needless to say, they lived with the kitchen a few years longer than expected and quickly installed central heating instead.

It's predictable that buyers are in for some aftershocks when they move into a new home. "People probably spend an hour and a half or less in a house. They're just looking at the bones," said Don Denton, a branch vice president of Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp.

Even focusing on the bones can be difficult when a house has been groomed to sell. Denton recalls a couple of agents years ago who were "masters of decoration." He said, "I felt sorry for buyers who went back when the furniture was gone. It will never look as good again."

Decorating sizzle can be particularly effective in a market such as this, where "a house in the $350,000 to $700,000 range is going to get a dozen offers," said Denton, particularly if it's attractive. "Buyers will give you their firstborn for the house."

"People are so hungry to buy they can't even see the flaws," said Alice Wilson, the designer and manager of Antique and Contemporary Leasing Inc., an Alexandria-based company that provides interior design services and furniture -- staging, as it's called -- to real estate agents and for model homes.

While Wilson says she never deliberately covers up a home's less appealing features, her job is to make it as attractive as possible. "If there are four similar houses on the market for $2 million, but one is furnished beautifully and the others are filled with grad student furniture, which is the buyer going to choose?"

Staging often includes putting down lovely oriental carpets, which can hide problem floors, piling logs in a fireplace that may or may not work, and teasing the eye away from awkward features such as oddly placed beams, ugly air-conditioning vents and less-than-superb craftsmanship. It's nothing that a buyer with flair, or a good interior designer, couldn't replicate.