How We’re Getting Our House Ready for Sale

I’m sure after you read that title you caught on – we’re moving!

I’d been scared to get too excited because I wasn’t sure it would actually happen. There’s been a whole lot of back and forth nonsense but as of last week its official – we’re moving. (I promise I’ll give you all the details on it as soon as I can. Right now there are still people living in the new house so I don’t feel comfortable spilling all of the beans until they move out.)

Now we’ve got a house that we need to rid ourselves of ASAP.

The Slow Transformation

When I first started seeing Jamie his house looked like a bachelor pad from the 1960’s and that’s by no stretch of the imagination. The house is in a really nice neighborhood and had good bones but cosmetically speaking, it needed some work. Here’s a short run down of what it looked like in the beginning:

• The porch had outdoor green carpet on it
• The kitchen cabinets were yellow and countertops were pink
• There’s carpet in the kitchen
• The main bathroom was blue tile on the wall, blue toilet, blue bathtub, and blue sink.
• The half bath has pink tile on the wall and a pink toilet
• Both bathrooms had carpet

And then there was the furniture. Straight from the sixties (maybe seventies.)

Over the course of the past year or so some improvements were made:

• Painting (every room in the house but one)
• Completely gutting and renovating the main bathroom
• Painting the kitchen cabinets and countertops (FYI: laminate countertops are pretty easy to paint.)
• Ripping up the outdoor carpet from the porch
• Cleaning out the basement and fixing the drains
• Ripping up the old lady bushes and redoing the landscaping
• Painting, staining, and swapping furniture

Aside from the bathroom renovation everything else was inexpensive but just required a whole lot of elbow grease.

BUT it still wasn’t in the greatest shape to be sold. (Especially since the house with the extremely nice interior next door recently went on the market for four days.)

A Whole Lot of Elbow Grease

Over the past week the amount of work we’ve been doing to this house has been on a pretty large scale!

We’ve repainted two rooms. One because it had a horrible paint job to begin with. (Call me lazy, I didn’t feel like giving it a second coat. In retrospect the original color I chose was pretty awful to begin with.) The second room was the largest room in the house, the living room/hallway. (That also had to be repainted because of another pretty dumb mistake I made which I’ll elaborate on in the picture and cost breakdown post coming later this week.)

Other things that were done beyond the painting:

• Scraping the old carpet glue from the porch (I spent at least 15 hours doing this. The only thing that would take it off was a straight razor and trust me I tried EVERYTHING.) I ended up not being able to get all of the glue off the porch and had to paint it.
• Decluttering. After going through everything we own and throwing away so much junk I seriously want to be a minimalist from now. I thought I was good with clutter until I had to start packing/staging/decluttering.
• Staging. I reused items throughout the house to stage the rooms. In reality the staging mostly consisted of paring down items to make the house appear bigger.
• A whole lot of cleaning. Like, an exhausting amount of cleaning.

As of right now I have all the bedrooms, bathrooms, and the living room done. Still on the list are the garage, the basement, and the kitchen. <—-That sounds exhausting!

Listing the House

So, I kind of told the real estate agent that I’d have the house ready to list last Thursday. That didn’t happen. I’ve now made enough progress that I should have everything ready by this Thursday.

I’ll be back later in the week with some after pictures of all the rooms, the cost breakdown on getting this house ready, and the pricing strategy. Then you all can tell me what you think.

Wish me luck and will me massive amounts of energy please 🙂