Getting My House Ready to Sell–Tips and Tricks

We have been on the market now for almost 3 weeks and we have had 6 showings.  After every showing, we receive feedback via email.  There is an 8 question multiple choice form the realtors fill out that gives us an indication of how the house showed, if the buyer is really a potential buyer, and if there is anything we can do to improve our home.  Every response has been excellent.  Our house shows perfectly –from curb appeal to cleanliness.  The only problem is the schools and the neighborhood.  Big inner city school system is not what most home buyers are looking for.  But we’re hopeful that the right buyer will come by and love our home and buy it up quickly.  We’ve been in the top three for 2 different showings, so I’m sure it won’t be too long now.  Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I’d love to show you some of my little tips and tricks on how I keep my house show-ready or at least easy to get show-ready in no time at all. It’s things that I will keep doing whenever we move to our new home, since it leaves your home spotless and beautiful in just a few quick steps.  Who doesn’t want that?

Trash

No one wants to see your dirty trash when they look through your home.  I’ve come up with some quick tips for keeping our trash tamed.

I have put all of my little trashcans from the bedrooms and bathrooms in the basement crawlspace.  I’ve always been bad at emptying those things on a regular basis anyway, so I got rid of them for showings.  Now, I just hang a Kroger bag over the handle.  When the showing comes, I take the bags with me and either throw them out in the outdoor trashcan or throw them in the van to bring back later.

My recycling days are on hold for now.  I used to hang a trash bag in my laundry room (which is right off of my kitchen) to hold our recycling trash.  We don’t have to sort our recyclables when we take them to the recycling dumpster.  Everything goes in the same dumpster, which makes it really easy on me.  But, now that I have to keep my rooms clean, I stopped recycling.  That’s one last bag I have to worry about grabbing before a showing, and one less hook I need to have on my laundry room wall.  I can’t wait to start recycling again. 

Laundry

No one wants to see your dirty laundry when they look through your home.

On a regular basis, I keep two laundry baskets on my closet floor (one for darks and one for lights) and one in my son’s room.  On a showing day, I will grab those three baskets and put them in the back of my van.  I’ll then make sure to vacuum the floor where the baskets were to get the marks off the floor.

The other bit of laundry we have is towels.  On my master bathroom door, we have three hooks over the door with three towels hanging there.  I take those down (hooks and all) and plop them in a wicker hamper that is slightly hidden beside my dresser.  After the showing, I put them back up to make sure they don’t get mildewy

This picture reminds me that I also run through the bedrooms and make sure all the dresser drawers are completely shut before we leave. I think I have a disease.  I leave dresser drawers open just a little all the time. 

Makeup and Bathroom supplies

No one wants to see your hairbrush, makeup, or shaving cream when they’re trying to picture themselves in your space.

I have a big problem with having too much STUFF.  One area where this is evident is my makeup and hair supplies.  Who knows why I need to have so much to choose from, especially since I use the same few items every day.  Getting my toiletries wrangled was probably my most rewarding cleaning/de-cluttering project in this whole house-selling adventure. 

I now have a basket under each sink for my daily items and figured out a way to store the rest neatly.  I organized and de-cluttered my hair stuff (like bobby pins, ponytail holders and clips) and organized my machines (like flat iron, hair dryer and hot rollers)  Thanks Pinterest!

My makeup was a bit trickier for me.  Included in my ‘makeup’ was my lotion, deodorant, and many makeup supplies.  They used to sit on my dresser, but after getting rid of some of my clothes (we donated a LOT last month) I ended up having a free drawer in my dresser.  I put my supplies in little baskets and they all fit neatly into that one drawer.  Now, I can take them out when I need them and hide them away when I’m done.  It makes me just a little giddy each time I hide my baskets away.  I really do love being organized.

Finishing Touches

I change out the bathroom and kitchen towels for ‘show towels’.  I bought two kitchen and three bathroom hand towels that look new and fluffy.  It cost me about $10 for all of them.  I put them under the sinks or in a cupboard in between showings, and my family knows they are not to use the new towels for their hands.  Ever.

Before each showing, I make sure I have one or two nice bouquets of flowers in my kitchen.  I buy the $5 bouquet from Kroger.  These things last weeks if you take care of them.  I re-clip the ends after a few days and put them in fresh water.  I may crush up an aspirin someday too.  My mother says it keeps flowers living longer.

One of my friends recommended baking some cookies before a showing so your house smells like freshly baked cookies.  I did that for the first showing, but now I find that it’s too much work for me to do that every time.  Instead, I leave out a bowl of candy.  So far it has been jelly beans (thanks Easter candy sales!)

I leave every single light on in my house (downstairs) when I leave for a showing.  I also open all the blinds and let as much light in as I possibly can.  Besides the obvious reason for leaving all the lights on (getting it as bright as I can in here), I have another reason for leaving the lights on.  All the lights in the living room are on a remote control switch, and I don’t want there to be any confusion trying to get the lights on when they come in the house.  

Another reason I leave all the lights on is to show off my under-cabinet-lighting in my kitchen. If they don’t look, they might not know that it’s there. (oh, and we’ve fixed the dangling cord, so it doesn’t dangle anymore)

When everything has a place, cleaning up before a showing goes quickly and smoothly.  It doesn’t stay clean and spotless every day, but it can get clean and spotless in just a few hours (including mopping the floors) when a showing is scheduled. I just hope someone makes an offer soon.  I’m noticing the diligence with which I used to keep the place clean is starting to wear off.  If I go 4 days without a showing, it may take a bit longer to get it back into tip-top shape, but it’s still doable. 

What other tips do you have for keeping your house ‘show-ready’?  Do you live in a house that is always ‘show-ready’? 

Getting My House Ready to Sell–Toys

If you have at least one child in your house, chances are you have enough toys to entertain 10 children at one time. At least that’s how it is in our house. Let me show you some shameful before photos I dug up from my files to show you just how bad it is in our house when it comes to toys:

There are a LOT of toys. Because we have so much space in the living room, we tend to fill it up with a lot of stuff. The biggest fear I had going into this house selling adventure was “what do we do with our toys!?” I couldn’t see how I was going to make it so that Jack could keep his toys, and we could stage this house for selling. Being at home all day, every day makes it impossible to keep a house clean. Toys are out as soon as the boy gets up in the morning. My challenge was to figure out a way to be a stay-at-home-family but not get the place messy.

In order to be ready to show our house in a moment’s notice, we consolidated, stored, and donated a LOT of toys. Here is what we were left with at the end of the day.

I can grab this box with all the little boxes inside of it and easily take them to the basement crawl space or even to the back of the van when we leave the house. Jack knows where everything is, and he now knows that if he gets something out, the last toy’s he played with need to be returned. It doesn’t always happen like this, but it does help.

We also have this ‘corner’ of the room with toys. It is also easily grab-able and stored in the basement at a moment’s notice.

His big trucks have been parked in the room along various walls at different times, but I finally consolidated them into one ‘garage’. Having just redone our floors, our closet hasn’t yet gotten filled with random things, so I had the space to park the big machines in there. Jack thinks it’s fun to park them in their garage.

I’ve had to do some hard weeding out of toys. Jack loves trains. He loves his Geo Trax that he’s gotten from his cousins, but we decided to box them up and store them in the basement for now. I think they may make a few appearances before we move out of here, but they’re not out ALL.THE.TIME like they used to be. There are two other train/car tracks that are still out for him to play with, but they fit in smaller boxes, so they’re allowed to be up here.

I have to admit that baby toys take up MUCH MORE space than toddler toys. Matchbox cars and planes can be put in a small plastic bin. However, a bouncer, swing, baby gym and whatever this is called: take up much more space in a home. I’m not sure what I would have done if I had to deal with these toys in my home. (For now, they’re in our basement crawl space)

There are other things we’ve done in our living room to make it bigger, cleaner, and nicer, but those are not so much toy-focused as they are furniture removal. I’ll do a separate post on those whenever we finish staging our living room. Once the carpet is done upstairs (I’m typing this while the carpet guy is doing our carpet today), I’ll be able to get more ‘after’ photos from our rooms upstairs as well. We’re moving right along on this house selling adventure! Thanks for joining me on my journey.

I’m Not Dead! (And Our Floors Are done)

I don’t think there were too many people out there wondering if I’d actually died or not, but I’m sure someone other than my mother was wondering if I was ever going to blog again.  I am!

I’d like to get back into a sporadic-regular blogging schedule, but we’ll let that work itself out in the future.  I have tons of stuff (by tons I mean about 5) to blog about, but I haven’t had the motivation to actually sit down and get any of it into word form. 

Anyway, I thought I’d update you on our floors.  They’re done!  They were done before Christmas, which meant we were able to host our annual family Christmas Eve celebration with my sister’s family and our mom.  I LOVE that Christmas get-together.  I love them all, really, but because this is the only one I host, it seems more special to me I guess.

Here is a look at our floors in the few Christmas pictures I could find that showed off our floors. I never took a really great AFTER picture, so these will have to suffice. 

This was the night that we actually finished.  I was in love.  We have since changed out the metal registers for wooden ones.

Here is the widest shot we have from our Christmas Eve party.  Those are my sister’s boys.  Jack (and the rest of us) LOVE them!   You can see how our dark coffee table and our dark secretary (in the back to the left of the tree) look with our dark floors now.  I like it. Though, I have my eyes on a light beige shag rug (that I’m hoping comes way down in price soon) to put under that coffee table.

This is our Christmas morning.  You may notice an absence of presents under the tree.  We usually stick to the rule of 3 presents for each of us, but this year, Rick and I decided to count our floors as our gift to each other, so we didn’t get gifts for ourselves.  I love how, on Christmas morning, I asked Jack “It’s Christmas morning, do you know what that means?” and his response was “Yeah!!  We get to get out the train!!” 

This last picture is blurry.  Too blurry to show as a good picture on a blog – unless you’re trying to show the length of the new floors you just put in, and you’re trying to protect the identity of the Plasma Car thief in our house.  It also does a good job of hiding the clutter in our kitchen. 

We love our floors, but it was HARD WORK putting them in.  It took about a week (or 2) longer than we expected, and we had two big situations that required us to pull up floor that had already been laid.  It was very interesting ad frustrating. 

Thanks for still hanging around my blog to see if I’m alive.  I appreciate all my readers, even the ones who never comment.  If you are so inclined, please leave me a comment today saying that YOU’RE alive, so I know if anyone other than my mother reads my blog.  I have missed you, blog friends! I hope to be around more often on your blogs as well as writing more posts for my own blog.

Happy 2012!

 

Not Again!!

Remember this post last winter?  It’s one of my best stories ever, and I highly recommend taking a second to read that post.  Jack still says “Bring me back my [insert object he wants here]!!” 

Okay, now, remember this project I worked on for my husband who bikes into work?  {He actually parks in the garage more often than not, though he should be saving us $85 a month by biking in just a mile or so from a free parking lot.} 

Well, when you put those two posts together, you get what happened over the weekend. 

Someone stole his bike.

It makes me want to storm out into the neighborhood and yell “BRING ME BACK MY BIKE!” I just know that if I watch the kids riding around, I’ll see his bike under one of their sorry butts.  But, I’ve been told not to confront anyone, and I don’t plan to. 

The full story is this….

Rick keeps his bike in the bed of his truck every single night.  It’s attached with one single bungee cord.  It does not have a tarp over it, and it’s not hidden in any way what so ever.  It’s been like this for about 2 years now.

This Saturday, I took the truck and left the van for my husband who was staying with Jack all day – God bless him!  He asked me to take his bike out of the truck before I took it, so I put it up by the front door.  (I couldn’t just open the garage door and slip it in to protect it).  Meanwhile, he had a rough day with Jack, and they never left the house.  Fast forward to Sunday night, and Rick says, “Is my bike still on the front step?”

“No, I thought you brought it in.” 

“I meant to, but I forgot. It’s really not there?”

“Nope, it’s not there.”

“Great.  Someone stole it.” 

I hate my neighborhood – mostly just the punks kids – and I can’t wait to move away.  Remember the land in the picture yesterday?  Let’s all pray that God provides us with someplace like that for us SOON.  The acreage can be less, the house can be less, and the distance away from our families can be less or more, but we’ll take anything He wants to give us NOW!

Thankful Thursday

This is my last Thankful Thursday post. It's been a great blessing to me to share what I've been thankful for. If you'd like to read the first three posts from this series, go here for #1, here for #2, and here for #3.  When I finished my post last week, I thought to myself, 'will I be able to come up with anything else to be thankful for?'  I hit all the big ones - Jesus, family, friends, chocolate.  What else is there in life to be thankful for?
(Sorry, no pictures this time)

First, I'm thankful for a roof over our heads.  It's a nice home, but in a not-so-nice neighborhood.  If we are still here when Jack is ready for kindergarten, I'll become a homeschooling mama.  I love the space we have, and that there is plenty of room for the three of us. This is a great house for a big family. There are plenty of not-so-thankful parts about this house, but not so many that I can't appreciate the good parts. 

Along those lines, I'm thankful for the means to pay for this house.  Since quitting my job as a teacher to stay home with Jack, I have not had to worry about finding part-time income.  Rick has budgeted us out the wazoo, and we are blessed to be able to live comfortably off of one income.  We have done some reading and studying of Dave Ramsey, who is the mastermind behind Financial Peace University.  (Some people refer to him as Damn Ramsey, which I think is hilarious, because at times, you do want to curse his name!)  Working very hard with what we had, we were able to get out of all of our debt.  Not many people can claim that, and I am VERY thankful to be in this situation.

I'm thankful for the holidays.  I love that they are a time our families set aside to get together.  We don't always get to see everyone throughout the year, so the fact that we will get together over the holidays is a real treasure.  We know we will see everyone eventually!  Also, the holidays give us a time to reflect on our blessings, Jesus coming to Earth to save us sinners, and His death and resurrection that covered our sins.  Wow.  What a great God we have!

And finally, possibly most importantly, I'm thankful for peanut butter.  It's my favorite food.  There is nothing better than chocolate and peanut butter, but it really does go with EVERYTHING.  Bananas, toast, graham crackers, bagels, apples....the list is endless.  (I'm pretty sure my father ate a peanut butter and pickle sandwich - I'm not willing to go there)

Thank you for taking the time to read my Thankful Thursday posts.  I hope that you were able to relate to one or more of the things I'm thankful for.  I've really been very blessed, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to share my thankfulness with all of you!  (And good for you if you read them all!!) HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  I hope you have a blessed day!!