Cue the Boyz II Men song “It’s so hard…. to say goodbye…to yesterday…”

We recently decided, after giving it lots of thought, that it’s time to say goodbye to our home and list it for sale this spring.  The house you’ve watched us over the years (here and on Instagram) lovingly fix up, renovate, and decorate, most importantly raise our family in.  Now that we’ve welcomed our third child, we are feeling very limited on space.  The big question I’ve been getting is “Have you thought about adding on?” the short answer is, YES. The thing is we’ve been through renovation before and we know what that entails and with the supply chain issues and prices being so high on building materials we just feel like it would be a big hurdle to get through for us right now. We need the space as soon as we can get it, like yesterday – ha! We also feel like given the lot size and layout it would eat into a lot of our yard space and that just isn’t something we want to give up either.

Since it is a seller’s market and interest rates are starting to rise, we want to take advantage of the market for selling purposes. We feels like it’s the right time in many ways to move on to our next adventure.   Let’s just hope we can find a place to purchase ASAP!  Selling our home will help us be cash ready so that when something does come along we are in the best position to make the strongest offer possible. 

Today I wanted to share some of my tips for getting your home ready to list, things that we’ve been busy doing for the last few weeks.   I also asked my followers on IG what their top tips for selling are and I’ve compiled a list that I think will be very beneficial to anyone about to sell their home.   Listing your home to sell can be overwhelming.   First we contacted a trusted realtor and brokerage to help us get started.  They are working with us to determine listing price and how to approach the market given our situation in that we haven’t found a place to buy (move into) yet.  We feel like we are in very good hands and are looking forward to moving forward with listing in the next couple of weeks (if we can pack and declutter fast enough). 

Things to Do When Listing Your Home To Sell:

• Rent a storage POD to declutter (Once POD is full we will send to their storage facility)
• Donate, sell and dump items to clear out your home
• Do paint touch ups or hire painter to neutralize wall colors
• Start packing early
• Use a notebook to label and code boxes so you know what they are in storage container once you arrive at next home
• Focus on clearing out basement, closets, cabinets and drawers of things you don’t use daily to free up space. 
• Hire a cleaner for a deep clean
• Remove family photos
• Get free boxes by looking on FB marketplace sites
• Stage your home by cleaning, adding fresh flowers, minimal decor on every surface and let all the blinds open for lots of natural light.

More Great Follower Tips:

• Dumpster to declutter 
• Start packing you’re going to have to anyways
• Get great photos
• Depersonalize Items
• Clean windows
• Clear off counters
• Hide everything dog related
• Cosmetic Updates (plumbing and electrical repairs etc… )
• Remove everything off walls (paint touch ups)
• Touch up trim/ scuff marks

Next, one day we dedicated to JUNK REMOVAL, we went through our stuff to determine what we wanted to sell, donate and dump.  We had a junk removal company come and take away all the items that we couldn’t donate.  I almost took a photo of this but didn’t because it was ugly but so satisfying. Between all of this we purged a great amount of stuff we no longer needed.  For the remainder of the items we ordered a POD and the packing process began.  We started by clearing out everything else from the basement and all items from closets that would not be needed for awhile put into boxes or storage containers and moved to the pod.  

Depersonalizing a home you’ve lived in and made your own for almost a decade feels very strange at first. But think about how it will help the next owner envision their family with in the four walls. So i’m taking down all the family photos and only leaving up some art pieces that I think blend well with the home and rest of the decor. I’m going to use bubble wrap and tissue to wrap up and carefully pack all of our family photos.

My favorite product for patching all the nail holes and touching up paint is THIS:

It’s so easy to use as it has everything you need in one, the top smoothes the excess putty and the bottom cap has sand paper on the bottom which makes smoothing the walls very easy. I have all the little touch up paints cans that I’m going room to room touching them all up.

Going through all the kitchen and bathroom drawers to organize and declutter has been a big task but finding great storage solutions like THIS plastic bag organizer has made it fun and satisfying! Going through this process has forced me to eliminate a lot of stuff we don’t need or just clutter that has been building up. I did the same thing with our linen closet removing all the old blankets and towels (donating them to local animal shelters) and leaving a few towels and changes of sheets has made our linen closet look very empty and spacious.

SHOP THE POST:

I hope these tips have been helpful. We are having the listing photos taken in the next couple weeks so I’ll update this post with some of those photos once that happens. It feels like there is still a lot to get done but I know that it will happen. I’m a bit anxious to see what happens with our home and where we end up. Ideally we’d love to stay in the town we are in but are open to surrounding towns too. We just have to cross our fingers and hope that the right one will pop up soon. Thank you for taking the time to read my post today and I hope these tips help you when you are about to sell your home! Best of luck!

Love,

Jordan

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