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Whenever someone new comes to my house (a friend or relative), I always give them a tour of the house.
I do this because growing up, my mom always did it and likely because she was into interior decorating and our our house was uniquely decorated.
But one day it occurred to me that this may be weird and I'll bet most others do not do this.
So, do you?
Sometimes I do, if the person is interested in seeing the house. I like to tell them what I have done to improve it, and what I changed and moved around, how it was when I bought it compared to how it is now.
Still, house tours decline the longer you've lived in a house. I've been here 11 years so I do them rarely now.
Yep- I'm super house proud but I hope not irritatingly so haha.
It is a small historic house from the '20s and is chock full of those interesting architectural details from that era that most people appreciate. Because it is effectively just a cottage, I certainly don't think my pride comes from a feeling of superiority- it just is a sweet house that evokes unprompted comments from perfect strangers declaring how much they just love it when they walk or drive by. It also is in a neighborhood full of sweet historic houses and gardens representing all kinds of architectural styles and mine is just happens to be one of them. So when friends come by who haven't been around before they usually ask for a tour and one of us is only too happy to oblige, and when they see the garden view from the deck most are almost shocked as it is an unexpected and beautiful vista in the middle of the city.
I'm also just a friendly guy and like to chat with perfect strangers about the neighborhood and house of which I've learned much about and not super freaked out about privacy issues. So once in a while even perfect strangers may get a garden or maybe even a house tour.
Our neighborhood annually hosts an Old House Fair (in fact, the 15th one is this Saturday) where vendors are present, fun food, music, neighborhood trolley tours and house tours are featured. Ours has been on three times, a couple of years ago over 700 people tramped through-Yikes! Actually, almost without exception the tour goers are very friendly, fun to talk to about old houses and appreciative of folks who host. Many have great stories of their own about their old houses and renovation or garden stories and tips and sometimes invite you over for a private tour of their place. I can also drum up business as an architectural designer specializing in renovating and adding on to old houses as I've done with mine and many others in the neighborhood so that's no small thing.
When we bought our current house we did extensive re-modeling and afterwards friends, relatives, neighbors all wanted to see the final work. Wife is proud to show it off.
The last thing I want strangers seeing is my music gear and so forth. Nothing like encouraging people to case the place.
I think the gist of the post is whether you give a house tour to folks that you have already invited in, not an actual home tour to strangers. So one would hope people you have actually invited in to your house would not also be thieves and steal your music gear and so forth later.
Our new neighbor came over yesterday and got a short tour. She really wanted to talk about dining table dimensions.
We have given a number of tours to our developer's prospects. We are proud of our house and we like our developer so we are happy to help him sell another house in Denver.
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