Monday, November 26th, 2007
We decided in February this year to sell our first home, move across the state line, and start our business. That seemed simple enough, but selling a house in a down market while you’re still living in it, with two children under 4 who also live there, is definitely not a walk in the park.
When people go look at houses, they want to see it like houses would appear on magazines. With all the pretty pillows arranged, the towels all folded in the bathroom, beds made, no laundry baskets laying around, no toys anywhere except in a hidden basket or nicely showcased on the coffee table, dishes must be washed and put away, driveways shoveled, floors dusted and or vacuumed, mirrors windexed, (and on the list goes). And they want to see it 15 minutes after they make the call to you / your real estate agent.
How is that possible with TWO kids who normally act like tornadoes tearing through things?! It’s not. That’s how. During the day we practically lived at the library or the mall or the park weather permitted and the kids nap in the car, so that the house doesn’t get messed up just in case someone decides to come see it. But it gets old after a while, and the kids get cranky and tired of not having any of their favorite things out.
For the whole 6 weeks that the house was on the market, we were on a roller coaster ride of emotions. Did they like the house? Why did these people come for a second showing but didn’t make an offer, any offer? No one called for showings again? What are they saying about our house? What can we do to get them to come back? It was worth it at the end though. We were fortunate and we got out of there just in time. And things all fell into the right places with time.
I don’t particularly miss the house. But I do miss having hardwood floorings, a super sized nice deck, and the private yard. It has an 1 acre yard, right smack in the middle of suburbia. It was a beautiful house. We have so many memories there as a family, good and bad. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s less than a week after we moved our boxes in there. Both of our kids were born and we endured so many sleepless nights walking up and down the hall. Our family visits and gatherings. We humans are the only species who carry and treasure our memories in the way we do.
Look at the house. Wouldn’t you have fallen in love too?
However, I do like living in a newer house too. The maintenance cost is lower, the insulation and electrical work is much better, and the bathrooms/bedrooms are more updated to suit today’s lifestyle. I LOVE the new code requirement for electrical outlets - there’s one everywhere I need it - I haven’t needed to use any extension cords!
Do you prefer old style homes, with charm and character, and likely lots privacy and land? Or do you prefer newer homes with all the modern updates?
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
NOTE:
Please feel free to add your advice / tips on selling a house, on moving in general, in the comment section. I’m sure you all have some fabulous ideas that I haven’t thought of or heard of.
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First and foremost, work with someone whom you feel completely comfortable with and who actually believe in your home’s potential and value. If they don’t believe in your house, how are they going to make any buyers / buyers agent believe it?!
Interview agents. Interview the finalists for a 2nd time if you have a hard time deciding on one. Ask the same questions to each agent. Negotiate on commission if you can, the worst they can say is no. Trust your gut feeling because most of the time it is accurate. Once you have found the agent to your liking, then you need to trust his/her advice.
I personally don’t recommend selling a house by owner, because you have to do all the showings yourself and most people feel uncomfortable viewing the house if the owner is present. But if the market is in the upswing and in your favor, then by all means, give it a try if you are not on a time constraint. We didn’t want to pay a huge hefty percent to a realtor but we didn’t really have time on our side.
So, to the point, here are the bullet points:
* Price it right. The agent should provide you with a full comparative analysis and suggest a listing price. Go to open houses that are in the same price range as yours, who are in the same proximity, seek out the competition and see what they / their house have to offer.
* DE-CLUTTER, DE-CLUTTER, DE-CLUTTER! No one wants to picture living in a house filled with STUFF everywhere, especially not YOUR stuff. You want people to be able to “see themselves” in the house; how you live is NOT how you should show the house.
* Pack away all pictures that have adults in them (and children’s pictures too if they are older). For some reason, most people are OK with kids’ / babies pictures but not grown up pictures. I think pictures of grown ups hinders potential buyers from seeing themselves living there; it’s someone else’s house and not mine kind of thinking.
* CLEAN. Clean the whole house like you never have before.
* STAGE, STAGE, STAGE. Again, this is the “how you live is NOT how you should show the house” idea. Stage up your house, spruce it up with decorative items, make it as much “magazine-like” as you can. Rugs, pillows, candles, wall hangings / paintings, nice towels in the bathrooms, matching pillow cases and shams and bedspreads, etc do make a huge difference in presentation.
* Kitchen counter spaces should hold only a few essential / decorative items.
* Bathrooms should be close to spotless.
* Beds needs to be made and again, magazine-like. THEY don’t get to keep your bed or bedspreads, but it will make it so much more cozier and pleasing to the eye if you make the bed like a magazine’s would.
* Pack away off season clothes and hide them under the beds or put in the basement or attic. Make your closet half full to give the illusion that it’s bigger than actual.
* If you have kid(s), pack away bulky or loose pieces of toys. On the same note, pack away stuff that you don’t use often. When showing requests comes, you want to be able to whirl through the house and tidy in a speedy manner.
* Paint the interior. Most likely daily wear and tear has left some smudges on the walls, painting it a neutral color will make them go away and give the space a new and fresh look. This is one of the cheapest investment/improvement that will give the highest return when selling a house. Be sure the colors flow easily from room to room.
* Go through and fix the “little” stuff. The cosmetic things that will matter a lot. Such as blown out light bulbs, broken hinges, nail holes in the wall, leaky faucets, etc.
* Make sure the entrance, inside and outside, is clean and welcoming with rugs, and a place to put their shoes.
* Make your garden / yard as attractive but easy to care as possible. Repair any siding issues if necessary.
* If you’re going to do any remodeling, go with the kitchen first. Then bathrooms. For major remodeling, those 2 will get you the most return for your investment.
* Don’t refuse any requests for showings. Try to accommodate all requests because you don’t want to second guess if you might have lost a potential buyer. The people who bought our house requested their first showing time to be 8-9p.m. That’s right, P.M. Our kids’ bedtime is 8p.m. We ate dinner, cleaned the house, packed up the kids and drove around the city until they fell asleep. And those people bought the house after 3 more unreasonable showing time requests. As much as I think we could have done better in the transaction, the fact remains that we sold it after only 6 weeks in a not-so-hot market. For that, I’m very glad we didn’t refuse any of their unreasonable request times.
Selling a house is a huge daunting experience, especially when you have little children and or pets. I really hated the whole experience. The next time we move, if possible, I want to move out first because I just really did not like tidying up every single day and never knew what would happen that day. There are so many factors on why a house goes and why another won’t. But if you decorate it magazine-like then potential buyers are more likely to be drawn to the house.
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
How cool is this?! It is a really innovative idea. The only problem I see is the bottom of the slide it too close to the staircase. Otherwise, I think this is an awesome concept.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
I have so much to write about and yet the words are just swimming in my head instead. I want to write about all the things that I learned from house-selling. I want to write about the two-weeks that we stayed at 2 different friend’s houses, 2 different hotels, and the thousands of miles we drove in those 2 weeks between our old city and our new city. I want to write (I mean, complain) about the 5-hours it took for me to scrub out the fridge in our new house. I would like to write about how the kids rolled down the tiny hill and frolicked in the new backyard, or how they kept going into the washers and dryers at the home improvement stores when we went to compare prices on appliances that the previous owners took with them. I also think it is time to disclose a big pet peeve of mine — I must have the toilet paper over, not under. But alas, the words are just swimmin’ around.
There are about 5,000 boxes left to open and put away and not enough time in the day / week / month to do so.
There are 8 million and three things to do before our business, KangarooBoo, will be ready.
But! Enough about me. How have YOU been?!
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
We are handing the keys over to the new owners on May 7th.
We will get the keys to our new house on May 17th.
Therefore we will be homeless for 10 days. Fortunately a friend/neighbor is willing to put us up during the interim so that we won’t have to spend thousands on hotel. Hopefully it will all work out, with 4 adults and 5 children under 5 yrs old under in one household.
Meanwhile, our whole lives worth of stuff will be stored somewhere in containers/warehouse until May 23 or so (our son’s “graduation day” at preschool).
Soon! This stress will be less!
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
I wish I could tell you that the house is sold already. We’re hanging in there. During Spring Break last week, we had NO showings and it was discouraging, but this week it’s much better. In fact, there were 3 showings yesterday alone. We have another Open House today. The weather is getting warmer so maybe people will come out more for house hunting. Hope so. Really really hope something will result soon.
My brother and his wife just had their third child several weeks ago. Annabel. We went to visit them and our kids were just smitten with her! She was so adorable, and a very good baby. She woke every 3 hours to eat and didn’t fuss much if at all. Seb told me “Mama, I want a baby Annabel.” On the way home, Hubby looked at me in all-seriousness and said “it makes me want another one.” Ha ha ha… We’ll just have to see about that.
Now, don’t read any further if you don’t want to read about my cooter. Seriously, consider yourself warned!!
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I uhhhh shaved myself. And may I just say OUCH. When I had chemo 6 years ago, I lost all body hair except my eye brows. I remember feeling very glad not having to shave my legs and pits, and it felt nice not to have hair “down there” too. But of course I was too sick to have done much with it or had much fun at all, being bedridden every other week. I DON’T KNOW WHAT CAME OVER ME but the other day I went and shaved it. Oh my. I didn’t anticipate the stubble pain… razor burn… etc etc. Do you shave there? Trim? Like it as is?
After several days of enduring pains that I don’t know how to describe, it’s not so bad now. But those few days is just.. miserable. I haven’t really decided if this is going to be the new me or if I want to go back to the old me. If you “maintain it”, do you have tips/advice to share with the internet, I mean me? Feel free to email me (email button to the right side) if you don’t want to leave it in the comments. Thanks!
Saturday, March 24th, 2007
I haven’t been commenting on anyone’s blog forever and I’m sorry. There is no excuse really. I hope this phase will pass soon so that I can get in touch again. Hope everyone’s well, or as well as can be. Spring tend to make everything better.
Haven’t moved yet. No official offers on the house yet either. Sigh.
We’re cleaning the house anywhere from 1 to 3 times a day, with 2 small kids running around our legs. Grabbing, whining, fighting, screaming, and whatnots are very normal occurrences here these days. Oh yes, and lots of shouting because we’re just not stressed enough yet.
When we have showings, we scramble to clean up everything, put out our better rugs and table liners etc., load the kids in the car and just drive. One showing was requested 18 minutes prior. I’m SO not kidding. EIGHTEEN minutes. I was still in bed… We left the house without our socks on.
Fortunately now the weather is warmer it’s easier to find things to do when showings are requested and we have to fly the coop.
By the way, here are some pictures of our coop. If you or a friend or friends’ friend are interested in finding out more (moving to Minnesota?!), email me and I’ll get you in touch with our realtor.
(Our city was rated as the #10th best place to live in the USA by CNN / Money Magazine just several months ago. The elementary school is one of the best in the state of MN.)
Amazing panoramic hilltop view, with a private wooded 1-acre lot.
Open floor that connects the living room (brick fireplace, built in shelves, cabinets, picture-window) to the kitchen (new flat cooktop, exhaust hood, fridge with built-in ice maker) to the informal dinning with an extra wide 8′ patio door, which opens up to a custom-made 16′x20′ octagonal maintenance-free deck.
A wonderful deck to watch the sunrise, enjoy and entertain in the extra private yard.
A baby room with built in organizers:
Brick fireplace in roomy family room in the lower level (walk-out) :
Huge office / guest room / workout room in the lower level.
All these and much much more! Such as hardwood flooring throughout the main level (except kitchen), high efficiency furnace and AC, maintenance-free gutters, storage space galore, pantry in the kitchen, plus many many updates.
So why are we giving it up?! Family. And career. We would live here for years and years if not for those reasons. We love this house and have been taking very good care of it. Hopefully it will get passed onto someone who will equally enjoy the charm and privacy of this house.
Friday, March 9th, 2007
The photographers came yesterday to take pictures. Later today (Friday) our house will be officially listed on the MLS.
It’s been 6.5 years since we moved in. Our first house, our first home as man and wife. Now we are a family of four. So much has happened. So many memories here, good ones and bad ones. So many physical changes were made to the house - the list was one page long. We had thought we would live here for at least 10-15 years and many of the improvements were made based on that assumption..
Those of you who have moved / sold a house (some more than once), any suggestions or tips? What would you do differently if you had to do it again, knowing what you now know? We’re moving to a city 3.5 hours from here.
Let the fun begin.
Monday, February 26th, 2007
Under the staircase storage, I found boxes upon boxes of paper. Papers from the first day of school in the US until the last day of college! That’s a lot of years. Book reports, quizzes, tests, class notes, report cards, elaborate research papers, short funny stories, mandatory journaling… on and on it goes. WHY did I keep all these crap!
Chuck’em all you say. Ah that would be very easy, except a few fancy schmancy teachers and professors along the way thought that it would be a great idea to use social security # as the ID. So I painstakingly went through several boxes of crap, crap that I don’t know how to do or understand anymore, like organic chemistry or calculus or mass transfer, just so I can keep my ssn out of the recycling bins.
I scanned through some of the papers. Throughout the years, I wrote about (breast) cancer, teen suic!de, teen pregnancy, (human) cloning, IRC. Topics that were and still are very close to my heart. In one of my “leisure elective” classes, Human Development and Family Studies (where they talked a ton about sex), I wrote down that eventually I would like to have 4 children. Yea. We’ll just have to see about that.
It’s very interesting to skim through my previous lives and see how far (or backwards, if you’re looking at the mass transfer and lab reports) I’ve come mentally. I have 2 or 3 more boxes of papers to go through before I move onto the bedrooms stuff. Ugh.
One of the remaining boxes contains all the letters I’ve received from my friends in China in the years following my family’s immigration to the US. I was unable to speak or comprehend any English. There were no other Chinese at my school. My friends back in China were lifesavers; they literally saved my sanity, having moved to a strange land on the opposite side of the globe and need to adapt immediately. I know I couldn’t and wouldn’t have gone on without them. Friends are very important, but in the teenage years, friends are all there is in life. I am wondering what I should do with all those letters.. It’s a huge file-size box full. I am still keeping touch with 2 of my friends, interestingly both of them have left China to other countries as well, and thankfully now it is communication via e-mails and phone calls instead of writing letters. My Chinese writing skills have found a permanent vacation spot somewhere else unheard of.
When I was a kid, I thought time went really slow. Now that I’m older (30! I used to think 25 was old!) the years seem to be going by faster and faster. Pretty soon we’ll all be white haired and toothless old farts looking at our school yearbooks wondering what the big fuss was all about.
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
A lot has happened in the last week. In a nutshell, we’re moving.
If all goes well (read: decluttering, cleaning, packing, more decluttering, etc etc etc), the house will go on sale within a few weeks. *deep breath* I will exhale when we have settled in the new place. But first, we have to find that new place.
Yea. Yeap.
Meanwhile, Happy Chinese New Year (this year it is Feb 18)! It will be a GRRRRRRRREAT one! Good health and prosperity to all!
Monday, February 5th, 2007
That last post was a downer eh.
First of all, I’d like to say that I was so hoping for a Desperate Housewives show tonight. Screw ABC.
Secondly, with the weather so bitterly cold, one can only imagine what it was like to be walking bare-footed with sand in between one’s toes and soft salty breeze gently touching one’s cheeks. Or green trees and fresh cut lawns.
Worry not. The mosquito season will come soon enough. Or will it, considering tomorrow’s high will be zero F?
It is perhaps a good thing to be confined to the indoors because there are lots of things to be done around here. First and foremost - declutter. Gosh I wish it was summer time so I can have another garage sale again. Crap I’ve done it again. Sorry. Summer will come.. summer will come.
So we have to declutter. I’m marking boxes with “donate” and “sell” and “keep” and it will probably take until summer to finish it all. Sorry, no more mention of the S word. I cannot believe how much stuff we’ve accumulated, I mean I‘ve accumulated. In this household, I’m the hoarder, the pack rat, the buyer. I’m sentimental and I have this “what if I need that again” school of thought, which is what all pack rats will tell you and what all you sensible people will say is “you haven’t even touched it in 5 years” or “you didn’t even remember you had it until you saw it.”
Ugh. This is yet another pathetic post. Will resume to silence now until further notice. Meanwhile, I’d like to invite you to view my dream vacation destination in pictures.
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
The other day as I was cleaning things in the basement, I realized just how much crap we have. The sad thing is, over half of the stuff haven’t been touched in years. Years! Reportedly, one of the rules of thumb one can use to declutter is, if you haven’t used it in one year but might later, then box it up. If you haven’t touched it in 2 or more years, then it’s time to donate it / throw it away.
But how do you give away your $125 college books that you might use as a reference in your professional career, one that you might likely go back to in the future? Loads and loads and loads of pictures that were captured in a time capsule, pre-digital age? How do you file away the pictures from the high school dance that you always had to sneaked out of the house to attend? What about those fancy pants that are way too small at the hip/waist after having two children, hoping someday you might fit into them again but probably the bigger reason is to show them to anyone who’s willing to believe that you were once rolls-free? OK the solution to the last question is kind of obvious and the question itself dumb, but you do know what I mean though.
The things that we collect and accumulate over the years, the things that define us who we are (that line was from A Civic Action I think) . Things. Things that have significant meanings to you but hardly anyone else.
Some things just can’t and shouldn’t be garage saled. Impossible to be thrown away but kept inside boxes and containers, to be looked at once every few years or so.
