My Worst Nightmare

Goodbye, house!

 

A couple weeks ago, we decided to sell our house. My parents had some bad news about their health recently so we want to be closer to them, but also we have been wanting a change of pace and we both felt good about our decision. Anyway, we talked to some realtors who live up the street, decided the price they suggested sounded good, and told them we wanted to list it. That was on a Saturday.

 

Monday I started cleaning my entire house, spurred on by the thought of a professional photographer coming on Thursday to post photos of every corner of my house on the internet for hundreds of strangers to see. Actually photos aren't too bad. At least just the outside of things has to look clean. What really motivated me was the thought of total strangers coming into my house and poking around, starting Friday. It's like my worst nightmare to have someone walk into my bathroom and see how I really live when I haven't cleaned for a few days. Austin didn't really get why the fridge had to be cleaned out and my bathroom drawers cleaned and edited, but I watch HGTV, and I've been house hunting myself. People like to look in the fridge. They like to open bathroom drawers, they like to see what's in the closet. House hunting is an unprecedented opportunity/excuse to see behind the scenes in other people's lives.

 

When you sell a house, you should sell more than the actual home. You should sell the myth that if you live in this particular house, your fridge and bathroom drawers will be magically clean and organized, there will be no fingerprints on the walls and windows, and because everything is so clean, you will have plenty of time to sit on the artfully staged patio out back. 

 

In order for me to sell this myth along with our home, I basically ignored my children for four days as I painted the pink room back to the same color as the rest of the house, deep cleaned every corner, obsessively painted over chips in the walls, and packed up a lot of our less-used belongings. With my husband complaining that our house was like a museum where we weren't allowed to touch anything, we took off down to Provo and moved into my parents house while they jetted off on their adventures. It was perfect timing. We stayed there for a week and had a ton of showings back at the house. I didn't have to keep things clean or rush my kids out of the house. We came back Friday, took the best of the offers we received, and moved back in. So awesome.

 

My favorite moment of this experience came as we were sitting down at our kitchen table to sign our acceptance of an offer. As we were about to sign, we looked out our window and saw two people get out of their car and stand by our sign looking at the house. Our realtor saw them and jumped up and ran outside shouting back over his shoulder "Don't sign that offer yet!"

 

I think it was meant to be that we move now. Everything came together so nicely. We haven't really figured out what we're doing on the other end yet, but I'll keep you updated!