Selling your house is a cruel and unusual form of torture. As far as tortures go, admittedly it’s less arduous than, say, not having a house to sell. Or anywhere to live. Or risking your life to escape persecution in your country on a leaky boat with not a single possession, desperate and traumatised and looking for compassion and wait, where was I?

Oh yes, selling your house. I am fortunate or unfortunate enough to have done this several times in my life, both as a child and an adult. Every time, it was appalling. Every time, I moaned and bitched and made the process far more difficult for everyone because my emotions run close to the surface. Living with me sounds like so much fun, doesn’t it? I know. And it is.

The whole premise of opening your house to strangers, inviting them to walk into every room and peer into every aspect of your privacy is weird. Unnatural. Creepy.

Then you have to do that ridiculous thing where you make your house fragrant by putting things in the oven to pretend you’ve just baked a pie. Or cookies. Because I don’t know about you but that’s totally how I like to spend my Saturday mornings. Baking pie, arranging flowers and lighting expensive smelly candles before inviting 86 strangers to nose their way around my bedroom.

During the times it’s open for inspection, a house is like a bride on her wedding day. Aesthetically? It doesn’t get any better. Alas, for the house (just like the bride) it’s a level of physical upkeep that’s impossible to maintain more than a few hours and requires a village and elaborate fakery to execute.

This is called Inspection Deception. It is rampant and exhausting and if you’ve ever sold a house, you’ve done it. The basic premise of Inspection Deception is to present a totally fake environment. Bland, false and utterly impractical. One in which there are no garbage bins or dog bowls. No umbrellas or piles of bills. No Indian takeaway menus or bread or old newspapers or gossip magazines or cookbooks that aren’t by Bill Granger or Donna Hay. An environment with no little piles of coins or stray plastic bags or unattractive fruit or shower caps or toilet brushes or spare rolls of loo paper or laundry baskets or visible toothbrushes or computer cords or phone rechargers or anything you actually need to LIVE YOUR LIFE.

All of these everyday essentials must be stuffed into your car, along with your pets, your children and your houseplants so you can drive around aimlessly for an hour while strangers admire your unnaturally uncluttered surfaces.

Before you leave, you must replace your useful stuff with bowls of lemons, framed black and white wedding photos, 64 pillows on every bed and a Sade CD playing gently in the background.

One thing you really don’t want when selling your house is to have small children living in it. Kids, generally, do not speak minimalism. They don’t do uncluttered surfaces. They don’t like it when you take away their garbage bins and hide their school bags and send their toys to live in the boot of the car for four weeks. I cannot imagine why.

Another thing sent to test you is bad weather. Every seller has a story about this. Like my anonymous friend whose roof started to leak badly just before her inspections began. “We got a guy out to patch it and it kept leaking,” she remembers, grimacing. “There was no time to get a new roof as the campaign had started, and the rain wouldn’t stop. This meant that every day after it had rained, big brown patches would appear on our white ceiling. So before every inspection I climbed up a ladder, heavily pregnant, and painted over the brown patches with white paint. And every day they would appear in different places. Eventually the interested buyer got a building inspection. We held our breath, knowing he’d be told it needed a new roof. The builder told him the roof was in great condition and he bought the house. I gave birth a week later.”

Agents always tell you to make your house a blank canvas before you sell it and because of this, all houses on the market look the same. I have a friend who goes to a lot of inspections because her husband is a property developer and she’s bored stupid by the repetitive décor. “You go to house after house and see the same linen on the beds with too many cushions to be real” she sighs. “You see the same Buddha style prints on the wall, the same huge displays of sticks in vases, the same basket of lemons in the kitchen. Sometimes you wonder if the house that you saw before is just following you around in an attempt to make you buy it. Most of the time the only interesting thing about it is making up lives for the people you don’t know that live there. “

That’s easy. They’re people who like lemons. And smelly candles. And lying.

Time to share open-for-inspection stories. Come on. You know you want to.

PS – have posted new Frockwatch: MTV Europe Awards

And the full Rhianna interview from last week where she discusses That Night