CHAPTER 1: BECK AND CALL
I am Home Depot’s bitch.
The purveyor of hardware and the wielder of hammers, the hauler of tables and builder of beds.
But mostly, I am a grunt.
A slave to my cell phone, leaping from the warehouse and store front of Pearce Home Designs to whatever address she bids me to go to. She being Zoe Pearce, my boss and for all intents and purposes, overseer.
“Luca, go to the Williamsons’ and swap out the EH-4 dining table with the WQ-7, because the stain on the wood is clashing with the hardwood floors.”
“Luca, I need you to pick up the cabinet fixtures I ordered and install them in the Clark’s kitchen, but only after you go to the house on Broad Street we were at yesterday and swap out the bulbs in the chandelier for a lower wattage because the lighting is too harsh.”
“Luca, be at my beck and call and never complain when I ask a thousand thankless tasks of you. And do it all while picking up my Starbucks and make sure you get back here before my Mocha Latte gets cold, or you’re fired, Roark. Again.”
She loves to fire me. Does it at least three times a day. And on the days she doesn’t, I usually quit. But I still show up to work the next morning because the woman has talent. And whatever she paid for her degree in Interior Design was certainly worth it because as far as professional home stagers go, she’s one of the best in the business. I never even knew home staging was a thing. But it is. And it’s a lucrative niche market if you’ve got the eye and the goods.
It goes a little something like this: say good ol’ Billy Bob wants to sell his house. Awesome. He moves his shit out to his casa nueva, brings in a realtor. But the realtor can’t sell it because no one wants to buy a home that looks like an abandoned warehouse. Enter Zoe. Realtor contracts her to stage it: i.e. bring in furniture and décor, tweak the hardware and upgrade some light fixtures, basically make it look like your dream home. And voila! House sells. We take the goodies back, and Happy New Homeowner moves in and tries to recreate what we sold them: its potential. But the thing is, unless they’re decking it out in a seven thousand dollar dining room table made out of mango wood, it’s just not quite gonna get there. But that’s not our problem. If anything, that’s why we’re the best and book weeks in advance.
Not to mention most stagers don’t have guys like me on their roster. They rent their furniture from the local Sales and Lease, $300 couches that have been used before and eventually returned when the temporary possessor bounced their $50 per month bill. The Sales and Lease will employ their own grunts to haul aforementioned stained furniture into the empty-and-waiting-to-be-sold house, tracking in dirt and damaging walls and scraping the hardwood floors. But Zoe doesn’t play their games.
Over time she bought and paid off her own inventory, high class pieces belonging in million dollar mansions. And who does she rely on to move it, repair it, maintain it? That would be me. Plus a couple of other dudes I wouldn’t necessarily trust with a shrimp fork, but whatever.
Now, the furniture she’s leaving in a house, waiting to be gawked at? Majority of the time, it comes back fine. It’s not like it’s being used, having dirty little kids jump on it or setting down their glasses of grape juice and leaving rings on the dinette. It’s just a picture, in 3D. But occasionally, stuff happens. Like when Mr. Prospective Home Buyer weighs 450lbs and sits in our $500 dining room chair, and cracks the back of it. Fucker. Because I now get to spend my entire morning taking it apart and trying to salvage it before Zoe loses her shit and I lose my job.
It’s not even like I have a background in this stuff. I was never trained in carpentry or design, I don’t have a degree in engineering or the qualifications to be an electrician or a plumber. But some things you just know how to do. Like how to stop a leak in the bathroom sink, how to swap a ceiling fan for a chandelier, how to restore wood so it doesn’t look like it came out of a hoarder’s storage shed. But lifting and moving furniture, helping to carry a couch or a bed up a flight of stairs? That I was kinda trained for. Pararescue will do that for you.
I spent six years total in the Air Force, two of them just in training. And when I was free of the pipeline, into the chopper and out into the combat zone I went. Skydiving into open fire to locate the guy who had been hit and was taking cover behind a rock in Afghanistan. Find him, patch him up enough to move him, then get him loaded into the bird and back to a base so the real docs could fix him up and do whatever: send him home or send him back out. Then you do it again, and again, and hope today is not the one when you’re being brought back on a stretcher. Or shipped home on a cargo plane with a flag draped over your first-class wooden box of a coffin.