I found myself viewing prospective buyers differently. When someone made a wisecrack about the wavy wood floors or sniffed at the color of paint on the walls, I no longer laughed it off. Now, I tensed up. Who were they to come into my home and pass judgment? Check out the layout and yard. You like it, fine. You don't, go on.

Yet, as each couple left, I thought, They'll make an offer. Who wouldn't want to live in an older home on a corner lot in a close-in neighborhood with good schools and lots of shopping nearby? For starters, people, I suppose, accustomed to going to the second floor by way of an interior staircase rather than a makeshift ladder or the outdoor staircase which leads to what used to be two apartments of this one-time triplex. Or maybe people who want a house where the enclosed back porch is, in fact, enclosed.

Whatever the case, the buyers stopped coming. The house slid back to its original American Chaos state of home decoration, only worse. The piles are higher, the messiness more sprawling. It seems almost defiantly messy now. As if we're daring someone to buy it.

Meanwhile, my initial blush of excitement has turned to bitterness and belligerence. On the rare occasion that a prospective buyer does knock on our door, I practically greet them like a drunk from the Bowery. "Whad'a YOU wan'? HUH!? See the HOUSE??? Go ahead. Look. See what I care." Then I clamber back to the hovel in the back of the house with the permanently drawn blinds and the tornado-hit-it decor otherwise known as my office, where I hole up and wait for them to leave.

The only thing worse than selling a house is not selling it.

If homes were actors, ours would be a star on the PBS home-reclamation show, "This Old House." It was built nearly a century ago by a newly widowed mother of nine kids. The story goes that when her husband died, she sold the family acreage and built several houses to get the money to keep her family together. This one is a huge, broad-shouldered, three-story thing, made of stone, stucco, and wood. I like to think of its, uh, lived-in condition as a kind of blank canvas to be transformed into art.