Decorating & Renovating
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Need advice for selling your house with kids
We are hoping to put our house on the market soon and I'm trying to determine how I will keep a clean house with a 2 year old and potentially another newborn.
We plan to store all toys in the play room closet and just take out a basket each day and rotate through the toys. I'm just nervous about being home with my son all day and then having to clear out of the house quickly for showings or what not.
I guess I don't have any general comments, just wondering if anyone who has experienced this may have some tips or suggestions on how to make the whole "on the market" thing more successful with little ones.
Thanks so much!
Re: Need advice for selling your house with kids
Always have a few empty laundry baskets. If someone wants to come through the house on short notice, just pick everything up, throw it in the laundry baskets, and stash them in your car while you drive around the block. :-)
If you keep up on daily dishes, cleaning, vacuuming, etc, it's quick to pick up small clutter right before a showing. It's kind of a pain, but the fewer showings you turn down, the faster you'll sell your house.
I wrote this exact same post a year ago, lol!
I had a 2 year old and a 5 month old at the time and I wondered the same thing. Honestly, it's hard work. REALLY hard work. We listed our house on a Friday and my husband had to go out of town the same day. I wasn't expecting any showings right off the bat, so I figured I'd be ok while he was gone. I was wrong- we had 4 showings that weekend and had a contract by Tuesday. As tired as I was at the end of each day, I had to go into work mode and bust my butt cleaning the house- but it paid off and it will pay off for you too!
I'd go through toys and honestly get rid of or temporarily store most of them. And I wouldn't store them in a closet- store them in a garage/shed/basement if you can. Moving is a time to purge and pack- might as well get a head start. People who are looking at your house really want to see the closet space and it's difficult to see if they are full of toys (even if it's well organized). I only kept basket full of toys out- and we were just fine. It makes it easier at the end of each night if you only have to track down 5-6 toys.
Since I had a newborn, we had a playmat and excersaucer. When we had a showing, I would put these items in my car or garage so they weren't taking up square footage in the house. Since I suck at keeping on top of laundry most of the time, I'd also put our laundry baskets in our car too. The last thing I wanted was someone to open my closet and have them buried in my dirty clothes!
Make yourself a list of things to do before you go to bed each night. Declutter surfaces, wipe counters, finger prints of appliances, pick up toys, etc. You'll really need to work hard to make sure you stay on top of things so that when you do have a showing, you can have a spotless home in 30 minutes. I am a SAHM too so that was a challenge for me.
Tell your realtor that you want at least an hours notice. This wasn't a problem for us, as most showings we had were scheduled the day before.
Lastly, think long and hard with your husband about the price of your house. For us, we weren't looking for a major profit. For example, we bought our house in 2005 for like $112K. We finished the basement and added a bathroom- so we could have listed our house for probably 140K, according to comps. However, we saw houses in our neighborhood sit on the market for 6 months to upwards of 3 years because people wanted too much for them. We priced our house a bit lower, at 134K. We didn't want our house on the market for 6 months+. No way was I going to go through that with small kids for that amount of time, but I'm sure people do it all the time. Ultimately, you have to do what is right for you and your family, but we definitely priced our house to sell it. It also depends on your market, but that worked for us.
Good luck, hope this helps. It will pay off in the end!
We have a two year old and are currently under contract on our house. We did a MAJOR purge and cleaned out everything but the bare necessities to get our house looking as "staged" as possible.
We timed it so that we put our house on the market the day we left town for a week vacation. Luckily, we had a ton of showings and were under contract that same weekend. It would be challenging to keep our house looking totally staged/perfectly clean while here, but we were prepared to do it if need be. Really, if you eliminate clutter and keep to the essentials, it's so much easier to keep things clean.
Before we went on the market we filled a 16' POD with furniture, clothing/things we wouldn't need for the next 4-5 months, all the Thomas the Tank engine stuff plus other toys, and most of the contents of the basement.
We requested 1 hr notice which was mostly fine, most people gave me a day's notice, but some didn't and that sucked. Do you have a friend or family's house you can go to during the day? That was a life saver for me. I could go to my mom's during the day when I had 3 or more showings so that I could make sure that naptime could still happen. (I kept our PnP set up at my mom's for DS2 to sleep in) Inevitably I found that people almost always wanted to schedule their viewings at nap time.
We also ate out or got take out a lot. I know people don't generally recommend that, but we don't have a microwave so it was really hard to make dinner while coming and going all day, and in as few pots as possible so we could also clean up at a moment's notice.
DH was really great about helping me get the house totally clean every night so we'd have a fresh start the next day.
I won't lie though, it isn't fun. At 4 weeks I reached my breaking point and told our realtor she had to switch us to 24 hr notice. The children and I could not take it anymore! I didn't need the full 24 hr notice, I just needed to be able to schedule viewings around naps the following day and know at the beginning of the day if I didn't have to worry about leaving at some point -or not. I still tried to be as flexible as possible with people and group showings back to back when possible.
Blessedly,we got two offers during the 4th week and had a signed contract at exactly 5 weeks on the market. Whew!
GL!
Thanks for these comments, they are fantastic!
We have been doing a HUGE purge for a few months now. We've gotten rid of and sold an enormous amount of stuff so we are definitely at the "staging" point right now. I love the idea of the laundry basket and throwing it in my car - thanks, I wouldn't have thought of that!
I will also have a dog which will be annoying and we don't live close to family so I may have to call a friend and see if they are cool with us dropping by during this visits. I think I'll also get ahold of a doggie day care for certain days, too.
I didn't read other replies but I was nervous about this too (3 1/2 yr old and a dog and we both work FT).
We got 24 hour notice before all of our showings (although I did hear most of the time that dosn't happen so we were really lucky) so that helped. Almost all of our showings were on weekday mornings while we were at work. After DD was in bed for the night I cleaned my a$$ off. In the morning I finished up as much as I could and packed the car and literally took DD right out of bed and put her in the car so she couldn't make a mess. lol After the car was loaded I would do a total walk through of the house to make sure it was spotless, basement light was on, closet doors were closed, etc.
Your realtor can tell you what is ok to leave out as far as toys. Our realtor was great and said that as long as DD's toys were put away neatly it was fine (I did put a few things in our coat closet and we have a storage ottoman full but otherwise stuff was neatly stored in bins and stacked in a corner in our living room).
I kept a basket near the front door with my jewelry box and DD's piggy bank and I added stuff to it that I was going to take with me while I was cleaning (my laptop, our iPads, etc).
Lots of great advice! We've been purging stuff both into a storage unit -- we outgrew our house a long time ago! -- and to Goodwill. And my plan is to try and keep everything clean when we leave for work in the morning (laundry basket for dirty clothes tucked into someone's closet since DS is really too young to sort his own and I don't do laundry but every 3rd day) and try and get a little notice so I can remove the cat and her required accessories (no one wants to see a cat box). Plus, she likes to upchuck her meals (she eats too fast), so I have to make sure there are no cat surprises.
Good luck!
TTC Baby #2 - BFP on 12/14/11 @ 10DPO - CP confirmed 12/18/11
BFP #2 on 1/13/12
We put our house on the market on January 11th and had two good offers on January 30th. We had an eight-month-old at the time, plus a dog and a cat, but we both worked full-time and our son was in daycare, so it made it easier in some ways. It may be different because that was winter when it got dark around 5pm, but we rarely had showings during the week. Most of our showings were on the weekend and they gave us at lease 3 hours notice. Of course, that's not always possible, and due to the market in the area we moved to, we didn't always give that much notice when we were buying our new house simply because houses were being sold to the first person who saw them.
Even though we didn't have to deal with it for very long, it was a pain in the butt making sure that the house was ready to be shown. We made sure that toys were put away every night, but we just left the exersaucer and a rocking seat that our son loved in the corner of our living room. When the house was being shown, we packed up our son, dog, and cat and drove around for an hour or so. We took all the animal stuff out to the garage so they wouldn't notice it when they were walking around the hosue.
Make sure that you are taking dirty diapers outside and not leaving them in the house. We working our tails off making sure the house was spotless before we left and the buyers could tell - our realtor was told by one of the buyers' realtors that it was so nice to see a clean house.
Good luck!
Both times we've looked, we've seen houses where kids live. There are two things that bothered me enough that I'd be put off by it:
1. Overpersonalization of the house/kids rooms. Having your kids' names on everything is very off-putting to a buyer, so make sure you depersonalize as much as possible. Also, check EVERYTHING for identifying paperwork, etc. Dude, there was one house where if we'd been creepers, we totally would have been able to stalk their kids. They left a bulletin board up with every piece of information pertaining to those kids' lives. Pedis, medical conditions, clubs, lessons, babysitters and close relatives' names ... everything. I was scared on behalf of those people. Admittedly, its a small town and people are trusting, but STILL.
2. Kids' crap in non-kid rooms. For example, I saw a house where the living room was full of toys in primary colors. The big toys - exersaucer, play mat, everything. I dno't have a problem with seeing toys in kids' rooms. But in the living room, I want it to look like a living room, not a kids' play area. If you have big toys and can't put them in the garage or car like PPs suggested, just make sure they're in the kids' room and organized quasi-neatly.