Today I took off work and was going to put the packing into high gear. Our initial packing strategy was to put all the boxes in the living room and dining room. Well, that got overwhelming really fast. Seeing the impending boxes and furniture of doom all of the time made my heart sink every time I went by. Plus it made it easy to lose hope that our house was ever going to look put together. On Sunday we changed strategies and decided to pack all of our crap into one bay of the garage. That helped immensely, but most of our house was still a disaster area. Hence, I took off today to try to put our house into some semblance of shape to sell. Move boxes, "stage," clean a little, you get the drift.
My other task today was to make appointments with a few real estate agents. The person we used to buy the new house is good, but she doesn't do a lot of business in this area normally. We want to list it with someone who knows this area a little more and can network the house with those who also know this area. We are going to let her try for the job too. She has already given us her marketing strategy, which involves putting it on the internet and getting professional pictures taken. She's really hot on the idea of professional pictures. Yes, I think good pictures are important - but I think we can take perfectly adequate pictures. She doesn't need to put the marketing budget all in a photographer. Again, I think networking the house is very important too.
I e-mailed 3 agents with a good reputation in this area for selling homes at 7am, and by 8am I had 2 responses. Love it. One of them was going out of town tomorrow, so she needed to stop by TODAY. Wait, our house is a packing sty!
So I revved it in high gear and went into the Parent Weekend mode. You know, it's the mode you go into when your parents come to visit you at college. You only have a few hours to make the place look presentable. By no means do you have enough time to do a good thorough cleaning, so you do the best you can with surface cleaning. Nope, not enough time to clean the bathtub, but I'll use Comet on the obvious rust stains. I couldn't even walk into 2 of the bedrooms due to our packing disarray, so I tried to stack boxes neatly & apologized profusely when the "parents" showed up.
I got done with the surface cleaning in time. The team really seemed to like the house, and they commented profusely on how well-maintained it was. Yeah, they were probably sucking up, as I haven't deep cleaned in a long time. :( They will be back on Sunday with their presentation. This was more of a walk-through. Then we have 2 other agents coming by on Friday. And then there's the agent we used for buying our new house, who I'm sure thinks selling our house is a done deal.
While I didn't get done what I wanted to today, I think it was a step forward. This whole thing may be on its way to coming together.
No comments:
Post a Comment