We had family in town this weekend, which in our house means the kitchen stays full, somebody is always eating standing up, and no conversation ever finishes in one sitting.

My son Quincy has been playing golf for about a year now. He’s seventeen, he’s 6’5”, and he has the kind of confidence that comes from being good at something quickly for the first time in your life. His godfather is my cousin David, who happens to be a golf coach, and Quincy had been counting down to this visit for weeks.

He didn’t ease into it. He walked up to David in the kitchen, before anybody had even set their bags down, and said, “You have three days to make me into the next Tiger Woods.”

Three days. That was the offer on the table.

David didn’t laugh at him, which I respected. He nodded slowly, thought about it, and said sure. We’ll have a clinic in the morning.

Quincy lit up. He wanted specifics. What time, what course, and most importantly, what drills were they going to run.

David said, “The art of laying luxury vinyl flooring.”

Which is the actual reason he was in town. His parents just bought a place in Sun City, and he came out to help them put new floors down.

The kitchen came apart. David held a completely straight face the entire time and kept going. He said, you know, like Mr. Miyagi. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. You do the boring thing a thousand times until your hands learn something your brain hasn’t caught up to yet.

Then came the parenting failure, because Quincy blinked at him and said, “Who?”

Seventeen years old and he had never seen The Karate Kid. We fixed that immediately. Somebody found it, we watched it that night, and by the end he understood the assignment. Not the crane kick. The fence.

I laughed about it all weekend. Then I kept thinking about it after everybody left, because I hear Quincy’s version of that request constantly, just dressed up differently.

Everybody wants the three-day version

I understand the appeal. The three-day version is the good part. Keys in your hand. Walking into a place that’s finally yours and setting your bag down on the counter like you’ve done it a hundred times.

Nobody daydreams about the middle.

The middle is pulling two months of bank statements. It’s a fourth Saturday of showings that don’t turn into anything. It’s a lender asking for a document you’re certain you already sent, twice. It’s standing in a house that has four of the seven things you wanted, doing math in your head about the other three.

None of it is glamorous. All of it is the drill.

Nobody gets the whole list

Here’s what I tell people early, because it saves them months.

You are not going to find a house with everything on your wish list. It isn’t out there. Not at your price, not at any price, and holding out for it is the single most common reason good people spend a year looking and end up with nothing.

What we do instead is sort the list. Two piles.

Pile one is fixable. Paint, flooring, counters, cabinets, fixtures, a layout that needs a wall to come down, a yard that’s been ignored for a decade. Ugly is fixable. Dated is fixable. Even a house that needs everything is fixable if the bones are good and the numbers work.

Pile two is not fixable. Where the house sits. What’s across the street. How long the drive is to the people you actually want to see. The lot. The light. Whether the neighborhood has the things you’re going to use every week.

Then we protect pile two and we get flexible about pile one. That’s the entire strategy, and it’s the difference between finding a house in eight weeks and looking for a year.

The hard part is that pile one is what you see when you walk in. The carpet. The wallpaper. The kitchen that hasn’t been touched since 1994. Those things take over a showing and stop mattering in five years. The things that actually shape your life are the ones you can’t photograph.

Which is why what you need in a house is vision, and if you don’t have it yet, that’s my job to bring.

Sun City

Here’s the part of the weekend I keep coming back to.

While all of us were laughing in that kitchen, my aunt and uncle were forty minutes away, putting floors down plank by plank in a house they bought on purpose.

They didn’t sell anything to get there. Their home in Michigan is still their home. They just decided that living their best life meant being in Arizona for the winters. Sunshine, family, and a change of scenery, without giving up the place they already love.

And they thought hard about that house.

It’s blocks from the rec center, which my uncle said was non-negotiable. The rec center has everything. A wood shop, a lapidary studio, the whole setup. He wanted to keep tinkering, and he wanted to be able to walk there. There’s a golf course a block away, which is a different kind of non-negotiable.

It’s a mile and a half from my mom, who is my aunt’s sister. Close enough to have coffee without planning it.

And then there’s the kitchen.

If you’ve been around here a while, you know my mom bakes more than a hundred pies from scratch for my clients every Thanksgiving. Crust included. It’s how I ended up known around town as the Pie Realtor, a title I did nothing to earn.

Her sister is also a baker. Of course she is.

So a big kitchen wasn’t a preference on their list. It was pile two, in spirit. A house my aunt couldn’t bake in was never going to be the house, no matter how nice the rest of it looked.

Everything else about that place was work. It was a gut job. Good bones, and it needed just about everything. What it did come with was a new roof, new air conditioning, and new windows, which is the expensive, unglamorous part that nobody wants to pay for and everybody needs.

They had to walk in with vision. On paper it was a project. What they saw was a bedroom for their granddaughters, a kitchen with room to work in, and space for people to sit and stay a while.

They weren’t buying square footage. They were buying twenty years of Thanksgivings in that kitchen with the granddaughters underfoot.

That’s the whole thing, honestly. Buying a home is a stack of unremarkable steps that add up to something that matters enormously. The steps aren’t in the way of the good part. They’re how you get to keep it.

So no, I can’t make anybody Tiger Woods in three days. Nobody can. What I can do is stand next to you while you take the steps in front of you, tell you which ones actually count, help you see what a house could be instead of only what it is, and get you to the morning where you’re the one baking in that kitchen in January.

Pie season is only three months out, by the way. Just saying.

My Golden Move guide is here if you’re thinking this through for yourself or for your parents: jennjenkins.com

Whenever you’re ready, I’m here.

Joyful real estate that feels like home.

WITH JOY,

P.S. What’s Jennuine Living, again?

We’re a gaggle of REALTORS(R), Lenders, and Creatives that makes joyful real estate feel like home.

We bring creativity, peace of mind, and a sense of delight into one of life’s biggest transitions, so that our clients’ experience:

-> More joy, less stress and fewer “oh crap” moments.

-> No guesswork, no surprises, just honest communication.

-> Connection first, here, you are family.

We love new friends, so visit our website, see a bit of our good work for our community, or follow us on the ‘Gram to join the family.