We're taking one more baby step towards selling our house. We spent the weekend staging the house.
In order to get top dollar for one's house, it is necessary to purge the house of the normal crap that infests our homes — all the baseball trophies, models of battleships with oozing glue, curling Christmas photos perched on bookshelves — it's all got to go. In its place have to go pillow and throws that make the room pop. You want to create a imaginary lifestyle that others will want to emulate.
As my real estate agent says, "Laura, people are stupid."
So, we spent the weekend packing framed photos of the kids in a box. We took apart the kids' bunk beds and gave the kids their own rooms. Ian was moved into a smaller room that we used as a book room/playroom/guest room, although he moaned about being "lonely in his lame room." I spent two hours peeling all the pictures off the wall that Jonah, my little nester, had taped around his top bunk. Steve finally hauled all the crap in the garage to the street for garbage pick-up. The attic has been arranged, so that people can imagine it as a master suite.
Moving is still a maybe. We have to be able to sell this house for a price that won't cause me to self-mutilate. And we have to find something else suitable. We told the neighbors and signed papers with the agent.
I was a little tearful about moving a few weeks ago. We completely revamped this place ourselves. And in the past few months, we've cleaned up the lingering projects. The place really does look fabulous. I looked around wistfully at the door that we refinished by hand and grew a little sad, but then I recovered. It's just stuff. It feels good to not be tied down by a house and to have a million different futures before us.
Apt. 11d 
If you can look at your house and think “wow, I want to live here” you know that potential buyers are thinking the same thing.
But there are reasons you want to move, and those reasons are still valid… and as much as the new “showroom ready” version of your home looks inviting, in order to be comfortable there you’d end up bringing in those curled up Christmas photos and pictures on the wall… and what you probably really want is a home where all that stuff (and your lifestyle) would fit much better.
Congratulations on a successful staging.
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For me it’s the process of staging that would cause me to self-mutilate. Good for you for getting over that hurdle!
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It’s amazing how well staging works. We sold last May to move back downtown. Staging turned our centre hall 1950’s era brick home from edgy/eclectic/modern to a more generic show home-ish beige-on-beige (think drum shade replaced by chandelier in the dining room).
Your realtor is right – people have no imagination. We sold quickly in a bidding war and were happy with the result.
We had the faux bed that turned the home office into a bedroom. You know, because purchasers cannot see beyond how you use the space!
Hang in there – it’s a stressful process, even if it’s something that you want to do.
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the normal crap that infests our homes — all the baseball trophies
I don’t think anybody in my family every played baseball. My dad has a trophy that says, “Least Coordinated Skier, 196*.” It is better than a “Participant” trophy because it is at least a distinct award.
Good luck on the trying to move.
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Good God, why?
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Good God, why?
You aren’t even on the same continent, right? No need to be worried they’ll ask you to help load the truck.
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Good luck. I hope the stories provide useful blog fodder. I think you have a number of readers who find the house buying/selling issue totally fascinating.
We have sold one home and bought two. The houses we bought were not staged (either time, I think) and we did have imagination. On the other hand, maybe we’d had to pony up another 10% if the houses had been staged.
We did stage the house we sold, in 2004. I don’t think staging helped us sell the house for more, but since we had moved out, our alternative would have been selling it empty, rather than cluttered.
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Former neighbors swore that baking cookies before an open house or showing helped. They sold their house quickly, so they could be right.
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Cookies might be a good idea. I always tried cabbage soup and it took forever to sell.
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Good luck! When we found this house, we were able to score such a good deal that we didn’t have to stage our home. If we’d taken the time to do so, we would have lost out on really fantastic price on this home, so I figure we came out ahead, despite the lack of fluffing our old house experienced.
I will hope that staging generates a quick and substantial offer that will make it possible for you to move to where you need ASAP. Saying goodbye to the old house will be tough, but for a good end.
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ooohh… that’s so exciting!! photos? 😉
Anyway… After 3 houses staged and successfully sold, I guess I can say I’m a pro at it. Staging for months sucks, though… 😦 So I hope yours sells comparatively quickly.
I hope whatever happens works out for your family — either selling and moving or having to stay & keep putting up with your school district. 😦
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I had to keep a house tidy because we were selling it. My wife had gone ahead as I didn’t have a job in the new city. We had no kid, so at least the mess-making potential wasn’t huge. Anyway, neatness is a pain. Every morning, I’d shine the kitchen faucet and pick-up the cigarette butts from the front porch before work.
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Question: Is the house well-priced? You can get the whole miserable business over faster if it is. On the other hand, there are predictions for more price drops (“Here’s Why House Prices Will Now Drop Another 20%” at http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-shilling-house-prices#comments), so you might do better to wait for your hotsy totsy target town to come down a bit. I’ve also seen the argument quite a few times that rising interest rates will push home prices down.
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I thought further price drops were only supposed to happen in pointless states like Florida and Michigan.
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Here are some more predictions for home price drops:
“Foreclosures may well peak next year [2011], said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president for RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosure properties. The market is expected to tally about 1.2 million bank repossessions in 2010, up from 900,000 in 2009, he said. Read more about foreclosure filings in 2010’s third quarter.
““We expect we will top both of those numbers in 2011,” he said.””
Things are slightly improving:
“However, the longer-term outlook for the foreclosure market is better since fewer homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments. Thirty-day delinquencies are down 11% since the height of the recession in the first part of 2009, Brinkmann said.”
“Jordan and others are looking to 2012 for anything resembling a recovery in housing. Even then, it’s going to be a long journey to stabilization; it historically takes five to seven years for prices to stabilize after a deep correction, Jordan said.
““Realistically, you’re not going to see home prices appreciate next year,” said Jason Kopcak, head of whole loans at financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. In fact, many in the industry are expecting prices to fall another 10% next year on a national basis, he said. Sharga said the national decline could be around 5%. Some economists expect prices to remain flat.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-foreclosures-home-price-drops-on-tap-in-2011-2010-12-13
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Have you listed it yet? When we moved, our realtors convinced us that we wanted to figure out a reasonable price, and then list it at that, rather than putting it high and hoping. You get 90 percent of the eyeballs you will ever get when the place is first posted on the MLS, and if it’s out of people’s range, they’ll never look at it. And once you start to come down, people are convinced you’ll come down further.
Plus, like you, we were living in the house, and did not want to drag out the process longer than needed.
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We sold our house last summer in 30 days- staging did amazing things for our house. Our realtor still keeps our site up as one of her “solds” and I look at those pictures and get wistful. The place looked great.
The new owners have done things I wouldn’t have done- they’ve made a cool Frank Lloyd Wright knock off look like Joe Schmoe Suburban house. It really bothered me at first, but now I go, “it’s only a house and it’s not mine.” It’s easier to get some distance than I thought it would be.
We dropped our price in one gigantic swoop to what we could live with and had an offer the same day. Don’t get married to a number. We had to think of what was our real goal (to move quickly) and gritted our teeth and did it. I’m glad we did.
And now that house is worth 50K less according to Zillow, so thank god we sold it when we did.
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