Last month, I wrote about how we were thinking about renting out our current house and buying a house with a basement and a big yard (for our hydroponic garden and a regular garden) in a nearby town. We’ve done a lot of thinking, discussing, and pro/con, risk/reward comparisons. We talked with my parents, who have owned something like 18 houses since the early 70s (no mortgages on all but the first two), and spent eight years as landlords. We considered our own tolerance for risk, and the fact that we both prefer simplicity in our lives. After all of this, we’ve decided to try to sell our house instead of renting it out.
So, the current plan is to spend the next few months getting our house ready to put on the market. It needs a new roof. The roof is 24 years old and has never been re-shingled. I know that it would not pass an inspection in its current state. My parents have offered to help us, and we will plan to do that when we get a warm weekend. We’ve done quite a bit to our house over the years already, but there’s still a bit of 80′s style brass remaining (light fixtures, towel rails, and a few outlet covers) which we will replace. We’re going to replace the plastic window blinds with wooden ones – Home Depot will cut them to fit the width of the windows, and then we’ll adjust the length. We used those blinds in our kitchen; they look great and are relatively inexpensive. We’re also going to do some painting, although I painted most of the interior two years ago, so we only need to do our bedroom and a bathroom.
My parents have generously offered to let us store some of our stuff in a house they bought last year (they’ll start renovating it as soon as they’re finished with the one they’re working on now, but for the next few months, we can store stuff there). So we’re going to move everything that isn’t essential for day-to-day life into that house. We’ll clear out some of our furniture, and anything else we can live without. Our house is only 1300 square feet, so anything that makes it seem bigger and more open will be helpful when we put it on the market.
Once we do all of that, we’ll put the house on the market and see what happens. If and when it sells, we’ll buy a new house in the less expensive town. We should end up with a much lower mortgage than we got on this house, since we’ll have a bigger down payment this time, and the cost of the house will be less.
If our current house doesn’t sell, we’ll just scrap the moving plan for the time being, and stay put. We like the simplicity of this new plan. Only owning one house at a time sounds good to both of us.
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