Sometimes, when you've been helping many, many buyers look through many, many houses over many, many years, you have to find a way to amuse yourself.
It's a very serious business making sure your customers get a fair deal on their new home and a little humor can help calm jittery nerves and make the process more fun for everyone.
So, one of the things I do when my buyers and I enter a house of, let's say, a certain "vintage," is create a scavenger hunt of sorts.
I'll tell them that as they're checking out the room sizes and floor plan, storage areas, garages and basement, that they have to help me with my hobby: Finding the Pencil Sharpener.
It appears that the origin of this household phenomenon is lost in the sands of time. Why does every older home have a pencil sharpener screwed to a wall, beam or workbench. It's always there. Always. The trick is just being the first to find it.
I know my dear, departed father in law had one. My husband says there's no mystery to why old men do this. "One day every old guy needed a pencil to make a note or mark a piece of lumber and every one he found in the house was broken because the kids or the wife had used it," he explained. "So he decided that was never going to happen to him again." Hence, the screwing of the sharpener to a fixed location near the man cave.
Until today I thought perhaps this was a regional quirk -- here in St. Louis' Illinois suburbs of Madison and St. Clair counties or perhaps in the entire St. Louis region. I was wrong.
Thanks to Wisconsin correspondent (via Facebook) Meaghan McBride Hayes, whose house my partner and I sold in Illinois, I now know that the sharpener crosses geographic boundaries. She sent the picture below from her new home up north.
Maybe the rest of the AR community can tell me if you see this in your part of the world. Share your shots. I am thinking of starting a blog dedicated to the sharpeners.
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