New House Q & A: a house log

Holy cow did you folks have questions about the whole selling/moving/buying process since yesterday’s little announcement! So we chose an FAQ post would answer as many as we could. We originally planned to share it tomorrow but you folks are still sending questions our way so furiously that we chose to share this guy today and our regularly scheduled Hands-on post will go up in the morning. So heeeeeeeere we go! #warningitslong

Q: Will you sell your current house by owner like you did with your first house?
Since it worked out so well for us last time, we’d enjoy to! So other than possibly paying a few hundred dollars to have it listed on MLS again, we are planning to market it and show it ourselves (we have in fact already had three showings, so our fingers are crossed). We do not even have a For Sale sign out front yet since we have been doing private showings to realtors and interested locals who are contacting us directly, so it is kinda weird. Haha!

Q: Did you consider renting out your current house instead of selling it? We did! But we talked to a few realtors who said that a few homes in our neighborhood that were for rent were having a hard time holding tenants since the plenty were so big (renters in our area typically want quite small yards so there is less for them to mow/maintain). So we shifted our focus to selling since things in our neighborhood seem to be picking up in that department (many homes are selling fast nearby, so we are hoping ours follows suit).

Q: When will you move in?
We have to sell our current house first and think showing it with furniture will assist that process (plus we do not want to move all of our furniture to the new house and then have the sale fall through). So our best guess would be that we will (hopefully) move into our new house in June, although it truly all depends on when we sell and when our closing date is. But we are already working on the new house as well as finishing things up around here, so along with all the staging/showing/selling posts about our current house, there will certainly be new house projects, plans, and pictures working their way into the mix. Ahhh, it gets me so excited to type that!

Q: Wait, are you selling your current house fully furnished!? Sorry! I made a comment about wanting to keep our furniture here in order to sell it faster on yesterday’s post and it sounded like we were selling it furnished but I swiftly updated it in the hopes of squashing that self-began rumor. Haha! We are not selling it furnished, we simply want furniture in the house when it is for sale (since empty houses traditionally sell slower and for less money) – but although we are bringing our furniture with us a lot of things will be in distinct places in the new house since the layout is so distinct, which should be lively to play around with!

Q: How many square feet is it? How can it be the same square footage as your current house when it looks so much bigger?! It is nearly exactly the same square footage of our current house, which we enjoy (it is around 2,500 square feet). It is simply that our current house has an 1,000 square foot addition hiding in the back that you cannot see at all from the front, so that is why it looks nearly as small as our first house (which was half the size). Meanwhile the new house does not have anything hiding in the back and instead has a second floor that is in plain sight from the street, which makes it look a lot bigger.

Q: Your new house is so fairly on the outside you will not have a thing to do to upgrade it! That is the funny thing about cropped photos. Below is a panned out shot that shows that there is certainly work to be done. So we think the outside will keep us pleasant and busy too…

Q: Tell me more about what made you enjoy this house in this neighborhood. Would you have taken any house in that area, or did it have to be the right one? We certainly would not have simply taken anything in our budget because we consistently want a house that works for our family (right house in the wrong neighborhood is sort of the same womp-womp as the right neighborhood but the wrong house). So the sweet spot was finding both. And when we pulled down the street and saw this baby at the end of the cul-de-sac (zero through traffic! a spot for Clara to ride a bike! a bug-hunting mecca for Burger!) we were fully smitten. And when the layout inside did not disappoint, we practically lunged for the offer papers. She might not look like much right now, but we think she’s going to clean up real pleasant :)

Q: How did you keep this a secret?! This was BY FAR the hardest part for us! There were so many moments I hoped to over-share every detail with you folks as we went! This house sort of came out of nowhere, quite swiftly. We were quite casually looking since we anticipated not needing something ’til this summer (or later). Then we saw it we had that moment of “we either go for it or be okay with losing it!” And we realized we were not okay with losing it. We in fact closed on it in the fall (now can you see how hard this secret was to keep?!?!?) but we had a million balls in the air (a book tour in progress, a bunch of projects for our current house that we hoped to finish before we announced/sold, and a few immediate upgrades to deal with in the new house like a leaking roof, a bad furnace, an alarm install and an opossum in the crawl space (all of which we cannot wait to post about in detail for you folks).

We in fact debated spilling the beans about things a lot sooner but we worried it would make us feel torn in half (wanting to stay focused on finishing and selling our current house, but knowing many of you would’ve mentally “moved on” to the new house). We also had to think about things like safety (we simply were not comfortable telling the whole internet that we had a new house that would be unoccupied for a big chunk of time). So we made the call that waiting, as challenging as it was, was best for our family, this journal, and our new house’s safety. And that way we could focus and knock out what we needed to do here before shifting into “new house mode” when we were ready. Boy does it feel good to be in that mode now. I ran around the house singing this song.

Q: Last time you closed on your current house on the same day that the new owners closed on your old house, but this time it you picked up the new house before selling your current house. What went into that decision? Once we were 100% sure that this was The House, we knew putting in a bid with a contingency that we had to sell our current house would weaken our offer. And we did not want to lose that house! There was in fact another offer on it, so we knew we needed to have a strong and compelling offer to get it and we did not want to offer over asking price, so we chose that going into it without a contingency to sell our house would make for a compelling offer. We were so glad that the bank at last recognized us both as full time self employed people (we have been doing this journal thing full time together for nearly 3 years), which was a quite distinct situation then when we picked up our first and current house (more on that here) – and it was remarkable to get the “you folks got it!” call.

Obviously carrying two mortgages for any period of time is not lively. But we triple-checked our savings before bidding to make sure we could handle it and found other ways to save. For instance, if we are able to sell our current house by owner like we did for our first house, we stand to save ourselves more than all the extra mortgage payments that we have been making combined (since we will not have to pay a seller’s agent commission). Plus, those overlapping mortgage payments are helping us pay down our loan (yay equity!), so it is not like money going out without a return (like renting or writing a seller’s agent check).

Q: I need more details! We know, and we are itching to give them. But please understand that we will not be discussing certain identifying details on our journal (like what neighborhood it is in or specific info about our closing) because we want to keep some semblance of privacy intact, so we are resisting the urge to over-share in that regard this time! We know that you folks understand that we need to keep some personal details private and we appreciate all of you who respect that. We’d be naive to think someone could not dig up the info if they truly hoped to (real estate is public record), but we are not going to hand anyone anything on a silver platter over here. Haha! Thankfully our current address was leaked even before we moved into this house back in 2010 and we have not had a single issue and our alarm system gives us remarkable peace of mind (let us simply say it talks to us and has eyes for us). And then there is our ferocious guard dog…

Q: When was it built? How many bedrooms and bathrooms does it have? It was built 32 years ago and it has 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms (so there is in fact one less tub for me to clean). The main bathroom on the first floor is a half bath, which I am already dreaming of redoing… once we strip all the wallpaper!

Q: How much do you think you will make selling your current house thanks to all the improvements you put into it? That would make a lively post! Simply like this post that we shared when we sold our first house, we are certainly excited to see how it all pans out and spill all the details about how much we put into this house in home improvements vs. how much those upgrades affected the sale price. Based on the interest in our current house (we have had three showings!) realtors seem to think that our listing price is good so we are hopeful there might even be a smidge of profit in there this time!

Q: Is it sad to leave Clara’s big girl room without her moving in? From the moment we moved in back in 2010, we consistently intended for that room to be a playroom (even though it somehow turned into a junk room for 2 years, oops!) so it has been excellent to at last enjoy that space and use it the way we consistently intended. Even if Clara is not quite ready to sleep in there yet, she has logged plenty of play-time in there and if she had moved in there we’d have an empty nursery, so either way we knew she could not sleep in both spaces so one would be a playroom while the other serves as her bedroom. The pleasant thing is that everything comes with us except for the walls, so since we did not do anything structural in there (like add a built-in accent wall or bunk-bed system) or cover the walls with anything fancy that stays behind (ex: cool wallpaper or a big wall mural) it can all end up at the new house with us.

Q: What about all the things that you did to this house that you cannot take with you? Like the penny tile and the new fireplace and the pergola? We enjoy enjoy enjoy those things, and will certainly be sad to leave them, but we did them ourselves – which means we can consistently tackle them again (and alter them in new ways) for the new house if we want them there. We are simply suckers for showing a house some enjoy, so we would never want to live anywhere and “hold back” on doing things simply because we cannot take them with us (for us, doing them is half the lively sometimes). So it is pleasant to spend the time that we have with those beauties while we live in the house, and know that they’ll live on. I am deeply comforted by the fact that we can consistently drive by and wave at the pergola. Yeah, that is certainly going to happen.

Q: I’d enjoy to see a post talking about which of your recent projects you did for resale value and why you chose them. Nearly everything we have done lately has been on our to-do list for over a year. So they were not things we brought in to our roster for resale – they were simply things we knew we’d enjoy to tackle, many of them from the day that we moved in. So it was less about which projects we chose to do for resale (none truly) and more about which projects from our to-do list that we chose to move ahead with. For example, converting a storage room into a useful playroom and upping the curb appeal would not hurt, but double siding the fireplace (which would involve a mason and a contractor since it is load bearing) felt like more of an “if we were staying longer we’d enjoy to do it” item. So there were a few things that we did not think made financial sense to do right now but we did fairly much everything else on our to-do list that we hoped to do. We will share a final rundown of Listy McListerson with everything checked off, and at the bottom we are planning to put all the “would have been pleasant” items that we skipped – but secretly hope the new owners end up doing so we can house crash them. Haha!

Q: Will you folks miss the convenience of a ranch and having everything on one floor? We think it’ll be lively to try out a fully new house layout since our first and second house were fairly similar to each other. And I am sure there will be tons of things that we miss about having a ranch, but we are excited to see how a two-story house works for our family. We enjoy that the laundry room is on the second floor with all of the bedrooms, which was one thing we truly liked about ranches (not taking piles of laundry up and down stairs).

We also secretly hope that the upstairs will assist us with separating work from family stuff, so we think we will institute a no-laptops-upstairs rule. Since we are only twenty steps from our office when we step out of bed in our current house, it’ll be pleasant to be a whole floor away from it in our new house. And it’ll be excellent not to have to clean the whole house when people come over (if they’ll simply be on the main level, we can shut the bedroom doors upstairs and ignore the mess like we did when we grew up in two story houses, haha).

Whew! So that should do it! Hope that helped folks. And we cannot wait to share a floor plan and all the crazy wallpaper-and-blue-trim-laden before pics with you folks while we finish things off at our current house and get this baby sold. Fingers crossed…