Last month one of my neighbors put his home on the market for $885,000, and a horde of potential buyers arrived on a sunny Sunday, the only day he needed to find someone willing to make an offer on the house.

As the hopeful buyers took their tours, I was working on my own home, rebuilding a wood fence that went up in 1964, which is the year my neighborhood was built. But later I went online and took the virtual tour of my neighbor’s house.

Of course, I compared it with mine.

The neighbor’s house was clean and shiny inside — staged to sell with minimal furniture. The house itself covered almost the entire lot. Inside and out, flooring to fencing, the dominant color was white. It seemed to me to be an empty container bleached of life.

My house offered a collage of color. Beige walls. Blue walls. Old walls, new walls.

Firstborn’s room had been painted green years ago — a color that came after her pink phase — and Jo’s room was painted turquoise and purple. I took a moment to look at them again, the ceiling fans I had installed in each room spinning circles overhead, and I wondered what kind of primer would be needed.

What would they look like white? Empty, I figured.

My neighbor’s yard was very different from mine. For starters, I had one. When it came to his yard, the neighbor was content with concrete. He did have hedges and a small patch of grass out front, like a throw rug, but the rest of the exterior was maintenance-free.

My yard presented a never-ending to-do list. Grass in need of mowing and edging. Sprinklers in need of adjustment — the arc of brown grass is typically a giveaway. The bougainvillea hedge, with its dagger thorns, was always in need of a trim. Tree branches too high to reach with a chain saw grow larger every day.

And the fence. Decades past its prime, it’s been chewed away by a colony of carpenter bees. Repairing it creeps forward in Sunday-size increments that have gone on for 18 months.

But it was wrong to compare the two houses. Unfair to my neighbor, unfair to me.

People give a house personality and warmth. Not paint. Not color. Not even plants, though I’m partial to plants, no matter how much green waste I’m left with at the end of a weekend.

The memories a house creates are what give it value, but not for the buyer. That’s why my virtual tour was different from my neighbor’s.

My tour went beyond the work I put into the property. It went to the soul of it all — and yes, I know, I’m too sentimental.

In my tour I saw Easter egg hunts in the backyard. I saw Thanksgiving gatherings on the lanai. I saw the place where I fell off the roof. I saw the place I buried the dog. I saw the concrete paver I kept when I landscaped the house, saved because a family that lived here before let their children put their tiny hand imprints in the wet concrete. And I saw the concrete sidewalk where my daughters did roughly the same thing in 2001.

My neighbor and his family must surely see that as well, the memories they made, when they look at the home they left behind.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.