Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

I changed my laptop background today. Actually, I am so low-tech that I had my 15-year-old daughter come and help me do it. Someone told me yesterday that if I am blogging, I am not low-tech. Heck, blogging is just talking, and those who know me well know I can do that really, really well. (For those of you wondering where this is going, rest assured there is a real estate theme - I am a rambler; you must persevere.)

That beauty thing in the title? It is directly related to my laptop background, and to my 15-year-old. It is a photo of our front yard in the spring. She took the photo by lying down on the lawn to get the best angle, when she was about 13 years old. (I think I know what she is going to be when she grows up, but I don't think she does yet. I try not to push.) Her harddrive crashed recently and she lost a lot of photos. Some were duplicated on my laptop. We reviewed the photos I have tonight and the "sunset photo of perfection" is not in my collection. I am sorry for her. Loss is a fact of life.

When we first bought this country property we learned that the previous owners had chemically treated the lawn. We decided we weren't going to do that, respecting our well water and the vast quantities of chemicals we would need to buy, spread, and repeat, year after year. That first year we had some dandelions. My husband put the kids on a patrol with a manual device. The next year we had more dandelions, and the thistle joined them. The manual device was designated "thistle only." The following year we had massive numbers of dandelions, but if we cut the grass often enough, they didn't go to seed. We decided that only the gigantic thistles, the ones that hurt if you stepped on them barefoot - they were the only ones that needed removing.

I toyed with the idea of pulling the tender dandelion leaves for eating, as I had seen nuns doing in a convent near a hotel I stayed in in Italy with my mother, back in 1983. Real estate in Michigan doesn't allow such extravagant vacations now, and let's not forget kids in college and dropping assessments in Michigan these days - I can live on my memories, can't I? Well, I never nourished my family on the plentiful dandelion leaves but I did learn a lesson from that photo, and it is the reason I am using it as my background.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (paraphrased from Plato) That is so true with my investors today. Is there a kitchen, who cares? Is the flow restrictive, who cares? Do the bathrooms need to be gutted, who cares? Is there structural damage, mold, other off-putting factors to end-user clients? Great!!! Is the price right? Ahhh, there's the key. Everything can be fixed for a price, and everything can be sold at a price. The art is in knowing what those prices are. The art...is knowing that a dandelion is not necessarily a weed.