It's About to Get Real!

Our house is supposed to go on the market this week. I can't believe it!

Our realtor came over today with a photographer to take pictures of the house for the listing. I'm excited to see how the final photos actually look and if they make the house look good.

The past week has been crazy! We have been in overdrive trying to get the house sale and open-house ready. In the last three weeks we have repainted all of the window and door trim on the outside. We have replaced outside siding tiles and painted the house to be all one color. (Due to replacing all the windows, we hadn't matched all the siding.) We bought plants to plant along the front of the house and in pots on the porch. We bought new seat cushions for our bistro table on the porch. We mulched all the open areas of our yard. We laid sod in the backyard and cleaned up the heck out of the back yard. (For all of our remodels, the backyard has acted as our staging area and it definitely reflected that until it got some love in the last couple weeks.)

On the inside we've touched up paint on the inside of the house. Repainted a wall in the bathroom and a wall in the laundry room. We have finished the crown molding, door trim, and baseboards in the kitchen as well as baseboards in the rest of the living areas of the house. We've cleaned, swept, dusted, and vacuumed until we couldn't do it anymore.

Pictures were taken today. There's nothing more we can do at this point. We will clean again for the open-house this weekend and after that, it's all out of our hands.

We are listing for $330,000. We have to make enough on our current home in order to be able to put a good sized down payment on our future home. It's nerve wracking.

We don't know where we are going to live if our home sells quickly or if we just want to try to rent for a year. There is so much to think about. Plus, there's always the possibility that our home doesn't sell, or we don't get any offers anywhere near our asking price.

Our asking price is in line with comps in the area. Our home is only 2 bedrooms, but it's 1100 square feet. It's also beautifully remodeled on the inside and the outside is cute and charming, but it does have some drawbacks. It's on the corner of a busier residential street and it doesn't have air conditioning. Not having A/C where we live could definitely be a deal breaker for buyers. It gets hot in the summer, which is why we wanted to get it on the market in the spring, before it gets unreasonably hot.

We are nervous, excited, scared, and every other emotion you could think of when it comes to selling your home! And the last few weeks have been crazy and a whirlwind! Now that the pictures have been taken and the open-house is this weekend, we think we will have a little time to relax.

The one thing that has really irked us the last few days is that if we had put in a good 3 weeks of hard work, we could have had our house exactly as we wanted it, but it took us listing it, to finally get down to work to complete the finishing touches we wanted done. Oh well, c'est la vie!

It's been a very bittersweet time putting effort and money into a home, that's not going to be ours anymore.

We talked emotions, now let's talk dollars.

Because of all the upgrades we have done in the past, the amount of money we had to put into getting the house ready to sell was relatively low.

All told, we spent less than $2000 to complete everything we wanted. That includes the outside gardening and sod, which ran us about $600. Paint and supplies which was about another $200. We put a cabinet in the laundry room that was $130, new blinds throughout the house that totaled about $500, we spent another $400 on trim (which we would have needed to buy regardless of if we were selling or not), and the remaining $150 or so dollars was spent on odds and ends. I don't feel like that's too bad considering we would have needed trim no matter what.

Hopefully we will get our money back and then some, but that remains to be seen. Wish us luck for the open-house and that we receive many offers!

I know this post is looooooong! If you stayed with me this long, thank you!