MOVING! Did you think I was pregnant, I bet you thought I was pregnant. I am NOT. haha.
Almost exactly 3 years to the day we moved in- we are packing up and shipping off! Where to, you ask? That part is still a little back and forth so I’m not going to get into the messy details but we are going to be buying a new house, just not right this moment.
The exciting thing to share is that in typical Emma-fashion I did a ton of reading about prepping your home for sale, staging, and selling. So, for those interested in, planning on, or think they may ever sell a home this one is for you. This may be a 2-part post but we’ll see how it goes…
First and foremost, we did have a Realtor. He is the BEST. So, let’s start there. Find you someone GOOD. Recommendations from friends are clutch- but only if they’ve used that person before. I love to support a friend of a friend but when it comes to selling our biggest life investment we knew we needed to have the right person. Mike McGuirk of ReMax, is the guy for us. He also helped us find our first home so we knew if he would have us we would want to work with him again. Luckily for us, he was game.
Mike came over pretty early into the planning phase, took a look at the house and we sat down to talk over the numbers. He let us know what he thought needed to be addressed, what we could ignore, and what we need to be mindful of come inspection and appraisal time. This discussion set up the next few weeks of work. We needed no less than 5 different contractors to come in and address some things. Mostly little repairs that we had neglected.
Next, I hit the ground running with searching for staging advice. I knew I had read a few blog posts about how to stage your home to sell QUICKLY, so that was where I focused my effort. I did not want our home to sit on the market for 60, 90, 120 days waiting for the right buyer to see through my style, knick-knacks, and over flowing essential oil collection to realize that this is the home of their dreams. The best advice I read was:
- Keep it neutral. If you have any rooms that are painted bright colors just go ahead and paint them a cool tone. White, grey. Grey, white. Safe zone.
- Have shelves? Take everything off of them and then put back just a few things. Don’t stress about hiding every family photo, it’s nice for people to see that a lovely family lives there.
- Three big pieces of furniture per room. Move things out, sell things, burn things. Whatever you need to do to clear up each room. Filling a room with stuff just makes it feel smaller.
- All White Everything. Curtains, sheets, towels.
- Put away your personal things. Make up on the counter, toothbrushes and deodorant, shower products.
- If you’re going to hide things- put them in furniture that wouldn’t be included in the sale of the house. People will open the closets, look in your cabinets, but generally won’t touch things that aren’t nailed down.
- Don’t overflow the basement, attic or closets. You want people to see that there is plenty of storage. I bet you don’t need 60% of the things in your linen closet. Get a head start on packing.
- Open all of the blinds + curtains and turn on the lights, leave all of the doors slightly ajar (nothing worse than going to see a house and feeling awkward opening doors) play light music, and load your diffuser with citrus scents.
- Leave! Don’t hang around during a viewing. It’s uncomfortable and the potential buyers will feel rushed. Take a walk, go to dinner, take in a movie.
It’s definitely harder with little ones, but its possible. I have some ideas about that but they’re only my opinion since we didn’t quite have that kind of an experience with selling.
Yep! That’s right! We’re under contract! We’ll be closing in January and that’s a wild story in and of itself. I’ll share more about it in Part 2. Until then if anyone has any moving boxes- send them my way!
Did you sell your home in record time? Drop your best advice in the comments, you never know who you might be helping!
Always,
Emma xx
