Selling, Moving, & Buying
Annoying Pop-Ups
Sure we hate ‘em on the internet, but we also don’t like unpleasant surprises popping up in our yard either. That means you giant crazy mushroom clump:
When we left for our daily walk yesterday evening I noticed what I thought was a pile of dead leaves knocked down by that morning’s rains. Nope, instead it was this mass o’ mushrooms that literally appeared out of nowhere in less than 24 hours. Not really the “buy my house” look we’re going for these days.
Now I consider myself to be a fun guy and I can appreciate the miracle that is nature (wow, that much mushroomage grew in just a day!) but this bloom of ‘shroom had to go. Good thing those suckers are easy to knock out (although there was a fair amount of slug-like slime involved). Here’s hoping they don’t pull a David Copperfield and reappear again anytime soon.
Pssst- Sherry here, ten points to those who can find the hidden mushroom pun that my cheesy hubby stealthily worked into this post.
Pulling Out The Rug
People have been asking us what we’ve been doing to “stage” our house. Short answer: not much.
Well, besides generally cleaning things within an inch of their life and stashing some items in the car a la this method. But we haven’t put any large furnishings in storage, repainted any walls or ceilings, removed any personal items like photos or wall art, or done any of the other tricks that we’ve heard through the HGTV grapevine (though I’m sure a professional stager would probably advise us to do some – if not all – of those things to some extent). We figure if people see a house that’s clean yet personalized and obviously well loved and lived in, it might be more interesting than a house that has been stripped of all personality and evidence that it has been enjoyed and appreciated. At least that’s our point of view at the moment. And thankfully we’ve had a few really promising showings so we’ll keep you posted if our approach ends up working out.
That being said, there is one pretty obvious change that we did end up making. We took a good hard look at the rug in the kitchen…
… and decided to nix it.
Even though that’s an old “before” photo from our old camera above, we realized the Company Store rug that graces our kitchen floor was doing us a disservice when it came to selling. It not only covered up the hardwood floors (hello selling point!) it also made the space feel less open in person (by creating a big definitive rectangle on the floor). Sure we loved it for the fun texture and softness underfoot, but because people aren’t buying a rug (they’re buying a house), we realized it was probably a smart call to roll it up and stuff it under our bed. Here’s what the room is looking like these days (this pic’s taken with the new camera, hence the longer shot, different lighting, slightly different angle, etc):
You’ll probably also notice that we removed some of the cute kitchen-y items on the counters to declutter things and show off another selling point in there- our granite counters. After all, we’re definitely not peddling a cutting board or a bowl of tomatoes, so we want to be sure the real features of the room are the ones that get noticed.
Oh, and our bathroom caught the rug-removal bug too. Gotta show off that marble tile, right? (Don’t worry, we bring out our rug friend when we shower so we don’t bite it on the aforementioned marble tile).
Maybe if none of our upcoming showings work out we’ll decide to try a few other “staging” tricks. Do you guys have any house-selling tips (or superstitions) that you wholeheartedly believe in? Or anything that you don’t think is worth the trouble?
Today’s Project
This morning, while Clara was doing this:
I attempted to tackle this:
A few days ago I slapped some spackle on the walls in the bathroom (we like Dap Crackshot), because as happy as we were with the big bathroom overhaul, you could tell it was definitely our first rodeo when it came to drywalling. And in our hurry to get paint on the walls we were a wee bit less careful with the mudding and taping than we could have been. But thanks to Operation Sell This House we’re making all those never-got-around-to-them tweaks to get things looking as close to perfect as possible. You know, tackling all of those projects that we’ll never get to enjoy ourselves but that we hope will woo someone else into moving right in (story of a seller’s life, right?).
Anyway, so after the spackle was applied to those cracked and uneven areas of the wall a few days back and I was 100% confident it was totally dry (trust me, semi-dry spackle is not what you want to work with) I finally decided to sand things down. Here are the tools you’ll need for this project:
- Dap Crackshot Spackle (as we mentioned)
- 100 grit sandpaper or a sanding block if that’s your thing
- A bra and underwear (or just underwear if you’re male or anti-bra)
- A post baby body (well, this one’s optional)
Did I lose you somewhere along the way? It’s actually quite simple. I learned a long time ago that sanding down spackle is a messy undertaking. So if you’re wearing a ton of clothes they all get caked in chalky dust, which flies everywhere when you remove them. So the fewer clothes the better. In fact, if you’re particularly brave or into nudism you can totally tackle this project on in the buff. It’s not like there are sharp tools that you’re using, and heck, you are in the bathroom (or another private room in your own home).
So all this quick fix entails is smoothing on some spackle with a putty knife (I like one with a bit of flex), giving it a while to dry (ideally a few days), sanding it down with 100 grit sandpaper so it looks as smooth and flat as possible, cleaning up all that dust that flies everywhere (we prefer to vacuum it all up while it’s dry so it doesn’t smear all over the floors and fixtures – which it can do when it’s wet), and then hopping in the shower and tossing your undergarments in the wash.
Next up I have to roll some primer and a bit of paint over that sanded down spackle for a cross-your-fingers-that-it-looks-good result (using the same type of roller that we used to paint the whole room should help match the texture for a less obviously “patched” look that a brush can leave). Can you guys handle the excitement? Here’s hoping it works out.
And speaking of works out, here’s an update on that asparagus plant that the dudes at Home Depot swore I couldn’t kill.
Things aren’t looking too promising for him (see what he originally looked like here). Eh, you win some, you lose kill some.
Closer To Godliness?
If it’s true that cleanliness is next to Godliness, then selling our house is practically turning us into saints. Not that we weren’t teetering on clean freak status before, but I’ve always considered myself more tidy than clean (i.e. clutter’s a no-no, but the tub can go unscrubbed a little longer than I’d like to admit to my mom). But now that we’ve got strangers touring the place it has kicked us into cleaning hyper drive – which I should note is much needed considering that having a newborn all but halted it for a good while this summer.
Yes, that’s me breaking out the ladder to give a good wash to the outside of our sunroom sliders. Goodbye grime, hello sold house! Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but here’s hoping my ladder hopping efforts don’t go unnoticed.
I’ll spare you photos of our other cleaning adventures (polishing all of the stainless steel fixtures, wiping down all of the kitchen cabinets, vacuuming, vacuuming, and more vacuuming…) and instead will subject you to photos of some of the curb appeal-ization that’s been going down ’round here. For example, got mulch?
It took me three separate trips to Lowe’s to get enough of it to spruce up our plant beds (I don’t normally go for the artificial color-boosted mulch, but it was on sale for the same price as the regular stuff and I figured this was one instance where “long lasting color” could do me some good). At least by the end of the day we had a crisper looking yard staring back at us.
Speaking of the yard, I’ve also been in the process of re-growing grass in some spots that the hot weather killed this summer. It’s been going surprisingly well – especially considering that our county is on emergency water restriction due to a long sweltering summer. Now I’m just crossing my fingers that mowing over it as much as I’ve had to (to keep that “maintained yard” look that buyers like) doesn’t harm those wee sprouts too much. Note: we just seeded and waited for rain- no sprinkler or fertilizer usage was required. Thankfully we’ve had our fair share of showers in the past three weeks and we’ve learned that grass really wants to grow in bare dirt. So rain plus grass seed usually equals luck.
And when I’m not mowing, I can usually be found blowing the driveway clear of acorns. We’re in the middle of our annual bombardment, courtesy of the oak trees surrounding our house, so our driveway gets littered with ‘em quite quickly. Just check out the collection I’m working on at the driveway’s back corner where everything gets blown. Methinks the squirrels should hoist me over their shoulders and sing “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” for this service to them:
As much as keeping the house in ready-for-a-showing shape is exhausting, we have to admit that it is nice to live in an über-tidy house almost 24/7. And we’ve got our fingers crossed that the extra effort will pay off soon when it comes to wooing a buyer. Ok, off to remake the bed…
