It was late January, frigid outside, while the California Cabernet was flowing inside. I said to the boss: “Babe, the market is hot, let’s sell the house.” We hummed, we hawed, went away on vacation, and came back.

Then it was a quick paint job, a visit from the stager to rearrange everything and make our home look like a bunch of overly obsessive alien neat freaks live in it, the video-photo dude snapping a gazillion midday southern exposure sunshine pics for the realtor’s website and installing the home showing app on our iPhones.

The rest was a three-week blur. The “FOR SALE” sign went up, visits came next, one offer, two, and by Easter, sold! Ba da bing, ba do boom, easy peazy, lemon squeezy. Piece of cake, right? Ah, no.

Let us be frank, the process of selling your home invites karma. You take good care of your home because it is one of, it not the most important, investment decisions of your life. But, as noted above, you sell your home as a fantasy to its next owner with your stager, photographer, and realtor all complicit in the illusion.

Neither you, nor the next owner, have ever nor will ever experience empty kitchen counters, spotless floors, beds with forever washed Egyptian cotton sheets, sparkling white disinfected bathrooms, blinding stainless steel appliances and chrome fixtures, or colour-sequenced walk-in closets. Not in this lifetime, or the next thousand if you believe in reincarnation.

After ten or twenty years of living in the same place, you accumulate a lot of cr-p and sh… let us just call it stuff.

After reading this column, search “George Carlin” and “stuff” on YouTube; it will be the best five minutes and eight seconds you invest this year. But I digress …

And this is where Karma says, hello, I am here for you, time to pay the price. First, it is the garage sale, getting a measly five dollars for your ten-season Stargate DVD collection or twenty dollars for that $200 shelving unit. Next up, the disconnection and reconnection fees on your utilities and services. Then comes the shock of what it costs to move all the stuff you could not sell or give away along with the boxes you haven’t opened since your last move.

Finally, the realization that it is never over, the purge, pack, and portage cycle will repeat like history itself … ouch.

Yes, the real estate market is still hot, but karma awaits in your MLS listing. So dear seller, not buyer, beware!