Our houses seem to look best right before we sell them.
We fix the gutter, paint the garage, clear out the garden and finish the curtains just in time to put the house on the market.
The theory is, I guess, that we'll get a better price if everything's done. If everything's straight, neat and tidy.
We're trying to guess what will make the house most valuable to the buyer with the biggest wallet. A theoretical, imagined, impossible future buyer.
It's the same when building a new house. More thought seems to go in to what will make the house valuable when we sell it, rather than what will make the house valuable to us to live in, next year.
And so we all build, renovate, do-up and design houses for a theoretical, imagined, future owner', and never build houses for the actual people who live there.
Yet another symptom of the commodification of property, where the losers are us, the people.
It's a fulfilling prophecy. A self-perpetuating market: We build/renovate houses for the market, which then sell on the market because the market is people buying what sells on the market.
What if we built, bought, sold and renovated houses that we wanted to live in. Designed for us, not the market.