Thanks to you my wife and I are in marriage counseling. She used to be a very frugal housewife and we had no financial worries. In fact, to prepare for retirement, my wife and I decided to sell our house and downsize to a smaller, less expensive home. My wife came across your website to see how to get our house ready to put on the market. She read that “staged” rooms should look like those in catalogs and magazines. Wanting to get “staging” ideas, she subscribed to every design magazine and catalog she could find. If that weren’t enough, she stays in her robe at home all day long waiting for the UPS man to deliver the latest catalog purchase. Our house is so overflowing with purchases that we’ve had to hire a professional stager just to eliminate the clutter she has accumulated. I want my frugal wife back!

Bill Kulhanek
Bel Air, MD

Well, Bill,

I have two things to say to you:

First, I cannot be held responsible for the way your wife reacted to the information on my website. Stagers are highly trained professionals whose expertise in making rooms look like those in catalogs and magazines comes with lots of experience. Your wife is clearly and amateur and should not have taken on the task of staging her own home. She must have missed my suggestion to go to the library to get ideas from the many design magazines they have available.

The second thing is this: I noticed from the picture of your wife in her robe that she is quite a looker. Could you possibly be in marriage counseling because she and the UPS man have developed some sort of “friendship?”