I canned figs last night. Which is one way to discover that a decision you made when buying a house has turned into a second job. A delicious second job, but still…

Our fig tree is about the width of our house and taller than the roof. It was one of the reasons I wanted this property. Someone else might have looked at it and seen leaves to rake but I saw something I would enjoy for years. Now here I am with jars of figs, still pleased with that decision.

It got me thinking about what makes a home valuable to the person buying it, and how easily some of those things get left out when we talk about selling.

We list bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and updates. Those details matter. But they don’t tell us much about what it feels like to live there.

What would you miss if you moved?

If you’re considering selling, that’s a question I’d love for you to answer before we write a description of your home.

Maybe you’d miss sitting on the covered porch while it rains. The kitchen window where you can watch the garden. The pantry that actually holds the results of your Costco decisions. Maybe it’s the established blueberry bushes, the workshop where you spend your weekends, or the sunny patch where your cat loves to sunbathe.

Here around Eugene, Springfield, and the smaller communities nearby, homes can offer very different ways to spend a day. A little yard in town might give someone exactly enough gardening to enjoy without taking over their weekends. A property outside Veneta might offer space for someone who looked at a seed catalog and forgot the word restraint.

These details help a buyer picture what they could do with a place. But first, someone has to point them out.

Living there can make you overlook the good stuff.

You walk past the same features every day. Eventually, they become background. That covered entry might feel ordinary to you, but someone standing in the rain trying to unlock their current front door while holding groceries could be very interested. A mature fruit tree might barely get mentioned because it has always been there. To the right buyer, it could be the thing they remember after touring five houses. That doesn’t mean my fig tree adds a specific dollar amount to an appraisal. Personal value and market value aren’t interchangeable. I wouldn’t price a house by multiplying jars of figs by how happy they make me. The math would become unreasonable pretty quickly. But I would want to understand what makes the property special and describe it honestly.

This week’s stepping stone: write down three things you’d miss about your home.

For each one, add a sentence about how you use it. “Covered patio” gives us a feature. “We can sit outside and listen to the rain without getting wet” gives us a reason to care.

If something is seasonal, take a picture while you can. The garden in bloom, the tree full of fruit, or the afternoon light in your favorite room can help tell a story that might be harder to see during a winter showing. We can make clear when those photos were taken.

And if you aren’t moving anytime soon, ask someone in your household what they would miss. I’d be curious whether you pick the same things.

What’s yours? The thing that would make you say, “I know it might not matter to everyone, but it matters to me.”

Thinking of you,
Krystal