Groove to your house's vibes
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
Ever considered the personality of your house? No? Well, take a good
hard look at that lime paint and flaking floral wallpaper. Then get down
on the floor into the lotus position and meditate hard for two hours on
the subject.
Stop looking at me like that. An American columnist recently asked
his readers, in all seriousness, to do this very thing. So it must be
sensible because they do it in America.
Now, once your family, friends, neighbors and two beefy paramedics
have managed to extricate you from said lotus position and you have some feeling returning below the waist, ask your inner child what vibe you just got.
If your inner child is screaming “abject pain - my lawyer will be
in contact”, then you're not looking at the big picture. (Besides, my
lawyer's bigger than yours. She really is - it's the high heels.)
If your home's strongest vibe is groovy ’70s purples and mahoganies,
then I must tell you, chaps (and you know you are all chaps), that
this is possibly why you are still single. Well, that and your
skivvies and tie-dyed tassle pants.
If your overriding house vibe is “only 15 more years of working my
fingers to the bone and I can get out of this rat-infested
hellhole”, well, clearly it has what I'd call a strong personality.
My Dad has one of these homes. It's a house on the wrong side of the
tracks. No, it really is. When the express train to Brisbane roars
by, his entire lounge-room wall begins to shake.
Dad’s house also has an overwhelming home-handyman vibe to it -
albeit a blind, unco-ordinated home handyman with the highbrow taste of
Homer Simpson, which, come to think of it, is precisely the sort of bloke
he bought it from.
I could marvel for hours at the not-quite-aligned faux-wood
panelling of any and every width you care to name (the artiste responsible was not fixated on uniformity) and the spiral staircase that leans to
the left. Then the right. Then the left. Depends which foot you're on at
the time.
But perhaps the furriest of places are the gnome homes. Little
concrete gnomes lie in wait to greet people in strangely frozen
poses.
Owners may or may not also have a flock of ducks flying up their
wall and nicely arranged lace curtains over the kitchen sink. This is a
cheery house. Or that's what the short, whiskery bloke with the red
hat and wheelbarrow told me while having a smoke out the back.
Houses with death's-head doorknockers give off a vibe which suggests
visitors should come armed with fishnet stockings and a minimum of
two choruses of Rocky Horror's Time Warp.
As for my home? Well, don't let the gargoyles scare you. They're
friendly sorts.
Really.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 02 JUN 1998