#165: The Dumb Thing We Did Before Listing The House
We are fessing up to an extremely poorly timed project that made our house look WORSE right before it hit the market. Whoops. Plus we share the smorgasbord of ways we are selling our houses. All three are being sold differently (including some with and some without the assist of a real estate agent). So we are breaking down how and why we chose each route, including why we paid to have a “pre-inspection” done for our Richmond home and how that changed our preparations for listing the house. Plus Sherry talks about an unconventional (and fully accidental) way she decluttered her digital life.
You can also find this episode on your go-to podcast listening app, like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and Spotify.
What is New
- This is literally the cleanest, emptiest, cobwebless-est our garage has been since we moved in… and it is all because we have been getting our house ready for the real estate showings that happened this past weekend.
- Sherry mentioned her Staging Your House To Sell post too, which has plenty more specifics about what you can do to declutter, neutralize, and clean your house before you list it – including some small and low-cost Hands-on projects you could do yourself. Take the room below, which Sherry staged, as an example. It was truly simply the difference of editing down the furniture (some was swapped with a nearby family room) and suggesting a new wall & fireplace color. Here is the before:
- And here is the after. Not a single thing was purchased – it was all simply swapped from other spaces and pared way down. Does the room look a little empty furniture-wise? SURE! But does the room also look about twice as big as the before photo? YUP! Remember you are selling the house, not the furniture. This home went under contract in one day of hitting the market after it was staged.
- Also, if you want to dive into the topic of whether or not to hire a real estate agent for your house’s sale, we talk about it more in Episode #56 (including the mistake we made when selling our first house by owner). There is also some play-by-play of selling our second house by owner in this post and some general FSBO pointers in this one. Plus, this week’s podcast goes over why we are using them in 2 of our 3 house sales this time around.
- We also shared a list of all the things we did to prep our last house for sale, which is something we will try to put together at some point for this house as well.
- Plus we have a whole Moving, Selling, & Buying category of posts if you want details on all sides of this process.
Well That is Embarrassing
- That is the sad state of our backyard, thanks to having to rerun the electrical line to the shed a few weeks ago. Perhaps in a distinct season we’d have better luck getting it to green up before selling the house. But hey, at least the shed has power!
We are Digging
- This is the Blokus game that we got from a friend lately and have been playing a ton (both our 5 and 9 year old easily understand the game – and both have beaten me at it!). It is also fast to set-up and fairly swift to play too, so it has been a lively addition to our game closet.
- Also, if you did not get the Teamocil reference that Sherry so beautifully sang (“There is no ‘I’ in Teamocil, at least not where you’d think!”) you can catch it at the beginning of this musical Arrested Development montage:
If you are looking for something we have dug in a past episode, but do not remember which show notes to click into, here is a master list of everything we have been digging from all of our past episodes. You can also see all the books we have recommended on our Book Club page.
And lastly, a big thank you to Agility Bed for sponsoring this episode. You can get 15% off your TOTAL PURCHASE at AgilityBed.com/YHL (simply follow that link to get the code). And after Feb 23rd you can still use the code YHL to get $200 off a hybrid mattress of any size.
Thanks for listening, folks!
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