Hide the teenagers and the toilet roll! Why does my estate agent want my house to look like nobody lives in it? | Zoe Williams

Trying to sell a house is pretty much a once-a-decade event for me, so I shouldn’t be surprised that times have changed. When I sold my first flat in 2006, the norm was actively anti-tidy. Obviously you’d spirit away food waste and animal detritus, maybe you’d put a lid on your laundry basket, but the market was overheated; everything was nonsensically expensive. In that respect it was much like it is now, except that back then, we were still surprised and a bit baffled. Consequently, a bit of visible wear and tear was beneficial, because people felt they might be getting a bargain from a dumb seller, rather than spending 50 grand over the odds for some pristine skirting boards.

Fast forward a decade, and things had changed somewhat. Everyone had got used to not being able to afford shelter, but the market was much slower, so you did have to spruce up your quarters a bit. For instance, I’d once managed to spill a triple espresso on the outside of the house, a vivid dark brown splash that no amount of weather, over the years, managed to shift. I remember arguing with the estate agent about whether or not I should get someone to paint over it – my point being, “What a silly notion, when the next people might want to paint the entire front some colour other than white,” and his view, to the contrary, being, “It’s just a bit off-putting, entering into a commercial exchange with someone who would spill coffee on their own house and never get round to painting over it. You’d wonder what else they hadn’t dealt with. Subsidence. Electrical hazard. A squirrel colony in the attic.” In retrospect I am ashamed at how slowly he had to walk me through this.

The standards now are insane. The phrase “turnkey house” applies to any property a prospective buyer could walk into and say, “Yes, I would live here immediately,”. So it has to look exactly like a hotel, which is a paradox because the one thing all humanity is agreed on, interiors-wise, is that none of us wants to live in a hotel. But these thoughts aren’t relevant, because whatever I’m flogging, it definitely isn’t turnkey. And yet the rules, overall, still obtain: there should be no sign of anyone actually living in the house.

Every bookshelf has to house the right number of books, as if you were living in some kind of library, rather than being crammed with books wedged in and shoved on top of each other, having been bought by a person who wanted to read it, rather than one who had measured the space and was looking for a volume 35mm thick. Every toiletry and medication has to somehow vanish, to preserve the fiction that no bodies have ever inhabited the space, least of all ones with any imperfections. An estate-agent master list of how to prepare includes the suggestion that you hide your loo roll, and your dog’s bed. But who in the 21st century is offended by toilet paper, and what is the dog supposed to make of that development?

Nobody explicitly says, “Make all your teenagers vacate for the viewing, and also, between viewings, stop living like teenagers,” but the look of surprise on an agent’s face to find any teenagers in the environs suggests that this was taken as given. One day, when this is all over, I’m going to give a Ted talk about how hard it is to direct young adults in any unit greater than one-at-a-time, and how magnificent an achievement it was that I even made sure no one was still in bed.

The problem is this: while times have changed to the point of this process being unrecognisable, I personally have not changed that much. I still don’t know how to tidy, and I emphatically don’t know how to create an air of calm elegance that people desire for themselves. Before every appointment I have to get a friend round, who is like Mary Poppins and creates serenity by wrinkling her nose. I trail unhelpfully after her, whining: “Why does no one understand that when I leave, I’m going to take my mess with me?”

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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