Prepping your house to sell

Most of you know that we are in the process of selling our house. We're actually at the middle point of selling, so that's a good thing! I've had a request to blog about our house experience and I figured that was a good idea. Not only is it hard to find information on moving in general, but it's also great to get other ideas from other people about how they sold their house and what they did to increase the chances of seeing a SOLD sign in their yard. It's also a great reminder for me of why we plan to not move again for a long, long, long time!

When we bought our house, we always had the idea that we would stay in it for about 5 years before we moved on to a different house. By then we figured that we would have a better idea of things that we want in a house that we intend to stay in for a long time.

We had originally planned on putting our house on the market in February of last 2011. Daddy T had done a lot of projects to our house and we still had a lot more to do in order to make it "show ready." We had our realtor come to our house (we stuck with the same one who had sold us our house) and walk through and give us his opinion of what a buyer would say as they walked through the house. We wanted him to be critical. He gave us a few things to do, so we tackled those projects. We worked almost every weekend in February and got really burned out. We were to the point where our children were really missing us and we didn't want that. So we decided to take a step back and slow down the process a bit. Because of that, we didn't get our house on the market until October of last year, but that's okay. It has worked perfectly for us because we wanted to live in the subdivision where our new house is located but could never have done that until now. God's timing is perfect!

One Saturday morning in February, my friend Danielle got up bright and early, left her boys with her husband, and drove 1-1/2 hours (plus lost an hour because of our time zones) and helped me box up, get rid of, and depersonalize. It was great! I needed her to help me figure out what to get rid of because she wasn't partial to anything, while I was! We got a lot of compliments on her staging. We worked all day long and the house looked great. We took down pictures, replaced certain items that revealed my personality (minus a few things) and recycled things that we have. We simplified, made rooms look "less full" and went through and chose toys that needed to be put into storage.

A few weeks after putting our house onto the market, our realtor had a female realtor come walk through our house and tell us a few things that could be changed in the staging to make it look more appealing (such as a wreath on the front door, flowers in the master bath, etc.) She made the comment to me that most guys will roll their eyes at her suggestions but when the house sells right after it, then they see that it was worth it. She was correct. Daddy T thought it was a lot of stuff that didn't matter. However, what he didn't realize was that most girls walk in and want to see a well put-together house. The better it's staged, the faster it will sell, theoretically.

As we go through houses, we feel bad for not purchasing it because we know how much work and effort went into getting it "show ready." But that's a post for another day!