For Sale

Two weeks ago we put our house up for sale.

Let me start by saying that I'm not a good housekeeper. At times I'm not even an adequate housekeeper. My house usually contains entirely too much clutter, dust, and more than one article of clothing in the floor that needs to go in the washer.

I've owned this place for seven years and it has never been this clean. I mean it's clean. We rented a storage building and piled it full of excess stuff, including some larger pieces of furniture, to declutter and make the house look bigger. At this point I'm wondering if I can just sell the contents of the storage building and be done with it because the house looks so much better, is so much easier to actually clean, and most of that stuff has been in storage for over a month now and we haven't really missed it (except for the two boxes I had to go retrieve last week). The only thing I'm really missing is my bookshelf, and that's because every time I have a book requested on Paperback Swap I have to dig through a box to find it. This time of year that's an issue. The start of every semester means reading lists that usually put my account on meltdown. But I digress.

We had new carpet installed that I love. We had half the inside of the house painted, which turned into a nightmare. We still haven't finished touching up all the places that the painters either missed, forgot to do, or just made a mess of. It was bad enough we didn't want them coming back to fix it. There are several other repairs that we know need to be done, but I'm thinking they aren't at the top of my list right now, we can do them if requested after home inspection. We're about a year away from needing a roof and I'm ignoring the fact that we've had another foundation shift that needs to be dealt with at some point, but it doesn't seem to be severe yet.

I keep hoping the house will sell quickly, but it's not really an urgent matter. We don't have to move, we just want to. I'm not looking forward to having another mortgage. I am looking forward to an adult sized bathroom. We've found 3 houses that we really liked, two of which have since sold. One is still on the market and just had a price drop, but it had some quirks and I'd like to look at it again and have a foundation report done before we buy it. I know it had a crack but I don't know how bad it is. I can live with a small shift (been living with one for seven years!) but a big one would be expensive. None of which will matter if our house doesn't sell.

We had our first showing this morning. I'm hoping we get some feedback from it because I'm really curious to know how people see it. They certainly can't say it wasn't clean. Small, yes. Old, yes. A bit outdated in places, yes. But it's clean! I'm hoping that at some point, for some buyer, that will be enough.