Have you noticed the newest spate of home improvement programs are all these “house doctor” things? You know, people who want to sell their house, but can’t, so they have some consultant-type come in and tell them what they need to do to make it sell. Then they do some stuff (paint, declutter, rearrange furniture) and it sells. Okay, clearly it works, but I don’t get it.

I mean, obviously you should fix anything broken, and clean the place up, remove fugly wallpaper or icky carpet because it’ll save the buyer the trouble. (Although why you haven’t removed it already, I have no idea.)

But inevitably, they show potential buyers walking through the house admiring the furniture arrangement or the curtains or the accessories or the color of the walls. This is what I don’t understand: when you buy a house, you don’t purchase all the previous owner’s furniture, junk, etc. along with the building. Do people not get that? Who cares what’s *in* the house? What you care about is it the bones of it: is it solid (falling apart, leaking, electrical hazards = bad) and does the space have potential? If the sellers have the worst taste in the world, so what? It’s not going be there when you move in. And it doesn’t matter what color the place is, I’d repaint anyhow, so that’s irrelevant to me.

I guess it just surprised me. If this is the standard way of looking at things, seeing only what is there in front of you, then clearly I see space much differently than most people do. I never look at rooms as they are; I always look at what they could be. Whenever I enter a new space, I immediately start rearranging, painting, constructing in my head. I know a room is well-designed when I realize I’m not changing things around in my head.

Where am I going here? Oh right. I wanted to mention this because I thought it might end up being relevant in some story or either. Just to remind me that people see physical space very differently. That not everyone has the ability to rotate things, change out colors, knock down walls all in their head. That most people can’t do that. And I don’t think it’s a lack of imagination, I think it’s something much more analytical than that, an ability to see how things could fit together. Like, erm, you know those puzzles that are like 15 or so different shapes, and you have to fit them into a square, and there are multiple ways to do it, and it seems really simple, but it’s not necessarily so? Well, I’m quite good at those things. I think it’s a similar sort of seeing. It’s not something I do on a conscious level, it just happens. Which probably explains why it’s not something I was really consciously aware of before.