Preparing the House For Sale

Yikes!  Everything is happening so quickly.  Our plan was to put the house for sale in April and to move early this summer.  Then we spoke to a Realtor.  Not quite sure how, but everything got accelerated.  At one point, we planned to list the house in mid-February and maybe move in late March to early April.  This plan has slipped, however things are still going way faster than expected.

It is kind of funny.   You invite a Realtor into your life and everything accelerates.  You invite contractors into your life and everything slows down!  In the last couple of weeks, we have had a carpenter, roofers, plumbers and electricians in the house.  Each of them were great, they worked hard and performed high quality work.  Yet, each of them found more work to do.  What was originally expected to take under a week turned into 2+ weeks of work.  And of course, close to double the cost.

At the same time, we are in the process of deciding which of our personal possessions to keep and which to discard.  I recently read a theory that says you should throw everything away by default.  While going through your possessions, pick each up and determine how you feel about it.  If it brings you joy, then keep it, otherwise throw it away.  Don't keep things because you think you should.  The theory goes on to say that you are left with things that you love, undiluted by things you don't.  As a result, we are throwing away many things that we have kept for decades.

Next comes the staging!  Since it has been 25 years since we have been in the house market, we did not know much about staging.  For those like us, stagers are people that come in and advise you on how to prepare the house for sale.  They suggest that you put much of your belongs in storage (clutter removal), replace some or all of your furniture (they provide the new furniture), touch up the paint, replace light bulbs, etc.  In other words, make your house look like a model home.  And of course, they want more bucks for all of this.

I don't know how I feel about all of this.  The stager tells us stories about how the house can be so much more valuable with proper staging.  The Realtor tells us that staging does not add much value to the list price, however it makes it much more likely that we will get an offer or more offers for our house.  Generating multiple offers and a bidding war.

A week ago, a neighbor asked if they could bring some friends to the house.  We responded sure, but realize that the house is a real mess.  Contractors all over the place and open boxes half packed.  The friends fall in love with the house.  They were ready to make an offer right there.  We told them that they needed to work with our Realtor.  Who needs a stager?