Home Staging Continues
The Fesitval Of Frugality was hosted this week at MyLifeROI. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you head over and check it out. There’s always plenty of frugal inspiration in the festival – something for everyone.
I’ve been hard at work again this week, getting our house ready for the market. We painted our porch, which made a huge difference. It’s a nice porch, but was just plain wood, and always looked like a bit of an afterthought on the house. My dad suggested that we could paint it, and I’m so glad he did. We spent about $40 on primer and paint (plus a weekend working on it) and now the porch matches the trim on our house. Much better. And great for curb appeal.
This evening I cleaned our windows. This is notable, because in the 6+ years we’ve lived here, we’ve never cleaned the outsides of our upstairs windows. I climbed up on a ladder, took off the screens, and scrubbed the windows. I also scrubbed the screens before I put them back in. This was one of the things that was mentioned in the home staging advice I read – clean windows make a big difference. It took me about two hours to do our windows, and didn’t cost anything other than my time.
I’m enjoying the challenge of getting our house market-ready without spending much money, but I have to say that I’m getting a bit tired of spending all my spare time cleaning, painting, and organizing. I will be glad when this is all done and all we have to do is maintain it! A couple weeks ago I made a list of things we still needed to do on the house. It had about 15 entries, and more than half of them are finished. Most of what is left is small things and cleaning, so we’re in the home stretch. Hopefully we’ll have the house on the market within the next couple weeks.
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FB, Your house sounds so spiffy. I want to buy it and I don’t even know where it is.
Check out this article from GRS about using a blog to help sell your home: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/04/25/21st-century-real-estate-use-a-blog-to-sell-your-home/
Cleaning up and staging your house for staging is hard work! We relocated about five years ago about an hour and a half away, leaving our house unattended and in need of work. We spent many weekends back at the old house making improvements before we finally had it market-ready. I think I can safely say it was the most stressful time of our lives!
Kristi – Thanks! We hope people feel that way when they see it!
AD – Thank you so much!!! That is an awesome idea. I showed it to my husband, and he’s excited to get going on a site about our house. He’s got quite a collection of websites already – this one should be a good addition. Thanks again for the idea
I am dying to see some pics of all this sprucing up!
FB, Congrats on the hard weekend work. When do you plan on listing your home? My house has been on the market 10 days and I am expecting an offer tonight. At some point you just have to say, “Good enough” and put it out there.
6 years in the house – What percentage increase do you hope to see on your sale?
One last thing… the next house, get double hung windows. It makes cleaning them sooooo much easier. So easy, a man can do it.
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