As of Thursday, we will be moving. After some fine-toothed combing in regards to the financing aspect, we’ve been approved, and thus removed our last (and only) condition on our offer. So at the end of August, we’ve moving!
Time to panic.
There is SO MUCH to do. First, we have to get the house ready to show. That means paint touch-ups, painting 3 bathrooms (which are still original “builder bone”), finishing the basement (putting up the drop ceiling), decluttering the WHOLE house, and staging and cleaning it. Our goal is to have back-to-back open houses on June 28 and 29. It’s going to be a very busy two weeks.
We got started last night; we cleaned off the shelf in the garage (I built a clear-span shelf across the width of the garage – 12 feet – to store off-season stuff) and put all the boxes of outgrown kids’ clothes up there. Looks much neater, got all those clothes out of the way (but still accessible if we want to whittle them down before we move), and shows how much space is really up there.
The space that was cleared out was in the storage room in the basement, which we did further work on this morning. We realized we have an awful lot of Christmas decorations (an embarrassing amount, honestly) that we just do not need access to, so we decided to get a 5×10 self-storage locker and shove it all in there. Lots more will follow.
It seems that a big part of staging your home to show it isn’t just cleanliness, but making it feel spacious. How do you do that? Move a lot of stuff OUT. So we’ll be taking down the crib (which isn’t really being used, as we’re co-sleeping), kicking the baker’s rack out of the house, removing a bunch of toy shelves from the basement, and who knows what else? I bought boxes on Thursday after work, and I’m not afraid to use them.
The only problem I’ve run into thus far is lumber. I’ve got odds and ends of all the projects I’ve ever done to this place in the garage, all of it useful, but not worth moving. I put a post up on Full Circle (formerly FreeCycle), but haven’t had any takers yet. Even if the ReStore would take it (they won’t – they only take 8′ lengths and only a few piece of what I have qualifies) our van isn’t big enough to take the 4×8′ sheet of OSB that’s in the garage. Hmm… what to do to get rid of it??
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we will not be selling through our real estate agent. With the way homes sell on our street (two weeks or less is pretty standard, and in a few cases next day) I just can’t justify throwing away 5 figures for someone to not really do all that much. We’ll be using ByTheOwner.com, the one with the traffic light on the sign. Of course, first the house has to be clean enough for us to get the pictures taken to post on the website… eek!
Hopefully, within three weeks we’ll have a firm offer and we can pack in a more relaxed manner. That is, until we start looking for tenants to fill our basement apartment in the new place. I’m not going to worry too much about that… as much as I’d like to find someone long-term right off the bat, we can always nab a pair of students at the last minute. Thank God for living on a bus route to two universities, huh?
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