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Dream House Awakenings
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Still, said Wilson, she has seen buyers "cry when they walk through before settlement and the house is empty."
Denton cautioned, "You have to see beyond the furnishings. Go in with your eyes open."
Tell that to the Elys, who bought their Silver Spring house with blinders firmly in place.
"It was like a movie set," Kathy Ely said. Out the living room window was the husband, lazing in a hammock, while behind him a pack of deer twitched their noses out of the woods behind the house. "Cue the deer!" she said with a laugh.
The setting was gorgeous and the neighborhood so perfect that Ely and her husband chose to ignore an oddity that should have made their internal radars scream.
Each time they came to look at the house the children were in bed and the would-be buyers could do no more than peek in at their rooms. "They were 6, 10 and 12," Ely said. "So it was a little bizarre. . . . I couldn't believe these children were always sleeping."
Luckily, what the owners were hiding "wasn't anything egregious, simply unremovable stickers everywhere," she said. Nothing that endless scraping, door replacement and painting in the kids' rooms couldn't cure.
And didn't they know what a nuisance deer could be?
"Anecdotally, yes," she said. "But until you live through it. . . . They eat our hostas and we're not too thrilled. But I still like seeing them."
Curiously, a dollop or two of extremely bad taste can be as big a distraction to the home buyer as a boffo decorating job.
When Susan Kuhn bought her condo in Kensington, "literally, there was a moment I made the decision," she said. "I was sitting in the kitchen at the counter with the windows behind me and a beam of sunlight came across my lap. I thought, 'It would be so lovely to sit here and drink tea in the afternoon.' "
The place has a lot to love. Four floors up and above the treetops, the two-bedroom, two-bath apartment has 2,000 square feet of living space and a wraparound balcony. "It feels like a house," she said. "I look at the lawn but don't have to mow it. I can grow anything on the balcony because I have every exposure. Full sun, shade. It's lovely to be in. It's like . . . heavenly."
