Getting ready to move

I have not moved for over a decade but I see what sellers go through getting their homes ready to sell.    They have me with my "to-do" list and my "do as I say and no one gets hurt". 

They hire me and I boss them around, if they don’t like it I would rather be fired than have to work with them knowing that they are sabotaging the sale of their home at my expense.  If it doesn’t sell in a reasonable amount of time they will fire me anyway because it is probably more fun to fire a Realtor than it is to do all the work needed to help sell a house.   I don’t make a dime until a property sells, and often spend three or four hundred dollars before the sign goes up.

For people that have lived in the same house for a long time it can be quite a chore to get it ready to sell.  The home needs to be uncluttered and depersonalized  so that it will appeal to the largest number of buyers possible and look better than the house down the street which is the same size and has a slightly better price.

As a REALTOR I know exactly what I would have to do to sell my house.  I have decided to start on the second floor, and work my way down to the basement, and clean and declutter.  We won’t be selling this year but  I wouldn’t mind living in a house that is in "move-in" condition.  Luckily I don’t have any wall paper to remove or carpeting to clean or replace.

After living in one place and raising a family here there are definitely opportunities to spruce the place up.  I can walk through each room and predict how a buyer would react as they saw over packed closets and rooms with just too much furniture in them.  I can pretend that I am looking at each room through the eyes of a home buyer.  They would see the scratches on the maple floors and the cobwebs on the transom over the front door, and that the front hallway could use some fresh paint. 

I sometimes take pictures of my clients homes before they are ready to put them on the market so they can look at the pictures and see how their home looks to others.  It is interesting how pictures really accentuate the positive and the negative, kind of like seeing a room for the first time.  We live in our homes so it is hard to be objective.

I have given myself a deadline of October 1st to have this task accomplished.  My husband does not know it yet but I will not be working alone.   Maybe one of the stagers that reads this blog will have some advice on this little project, if so I would consider sharing before and after pictures and inviting a critique. 

My inspiration for this project came from the post about senior housing, and comments from one of our readers. See Housing options for older adults.