My Real Life HGTV Experience

It was July. It was hot. Moving was not on our radar at all. My husband occasionally mentioned it. I dismissed it as if he was crazy. I had been asking for 5 years for better shelving in our laundry room. My husband finally caved. Here is what it used to look like:

From then on, it was like "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie." Because if you put new shelving in your laundry room,

You realize you probably need to paint it.

If you paint it, you realize you need to paint the trim. And the door. And get new hardware for the door:

Then your husband realizes it looks so amazing, you need to put your house on the market and start looking for another place. Farewell sweet laundry room. You were amazing from July-September. I will miss you.

So if you paint the trim and door to the laundry room, you have to do all the trim in the hallway and those doors too...

Then, you have to paint the hallway, the trim, the living room, the entryway, and the dining room too when you realize your trim used to be tan...

We hired most of this done (Just the high parts and the trim). So worth it! But, we'll talk more about that later.

The dining room before and after:

Even though I really liked the red dining room, we decided in the interest of selling the house quickly, to do something more neutral and something to lighten it up and make it feel as big as it really is.

My mom helped me sew some new curtains for the side lights.

Then I realized I needed to treat the hardwood floors with Bona.

Meanwhile, my poor children are running around the house trying to find the toys that I had packed up. We packed up 90% of our junk and stuck it in the garage while we were showing the house. Turns out that most people don't care about your garage or how much stuff you have in it. They just care how many cars would fit if they lived there.

Fixing everything that is wrong with your house to sell it is really bittersweet. My husband replaced almost half of the boards on the porch as well as the stairs and the railing and then we hired a painter to stain it all one color. It turned out so pretty! We got rid of our gross porch furniture and I power washed the rest of it to look new again.

I've said it before, but DEPERSONALIZE. DECLUTTER. REPAIR BROKEN STUFF. Always. Getting rid of bolder paint colors was one of the ways we depersonalized. We also took down pictures of people, monograms, and anything that would make certain people feel like they weren't at home.

I painted the door gray, found a neutral wreath, and a mat that said "Welcome" instead of my initial.

Now I'm just going to list the pictures that my friend, Elisabeth Eaton, took for the listing. You should definitely hire a photographer. Even if you think you know how to take good house pictures, you don't. Hire Elisabeth!

I made sure that I had pressure washed certain areas and that the lawn mowers had come the day before pictures were made.

Bought a cheap but new and neutral door mat.

 We only had two pictures hanging on the walls after we painted. Took away all of our clutter for clean lines.

Took away some of our dining chairs and the secretary desk to make the room feel larger and draw the eye upward. I cleaned my china cabinet and took out some of the clutter. I used my sparkliest dishes.

 Minimal mantel decor. Fresh paint.

 No counter clutter at all. 

 We took the leaf out of our table to make the room feel bigger.

 Switched out the lamps for a matching pair, hung less personalized art, and always made sure our bed was made.

 White towels. Matching hangers. No clutter.

 I hired a maid to come the day before the photographer and the showings. Completely worth it! I also painted all of the trim in here white instead of tan. I painted the doors white as well. It made a huge difference!

 The boys' rooms were the hardest to declutter.

 I made sure to take every #2 diaper to the outside trash right away! How a house smells is as important as it looks!

 Aww, the laundry room again! I'll miss you.

 I've talked about this before, but it really helps to help the home buyer envision how they could use this vast space.

 I steam cleaned the carpets throughout the house. Again, for the smell and the look of it!

 Rearranging the craft room added the feel of more space

Ok. So, here's the HGTV part of the story. We met with the realtor on August 5th to discuss price and what we needed to update. As soon as painting and pictures were done, we put the house on the market on Sept. 9th. We had 11 showings that weekend. We had an offer Saturday night, talk of another offer, and tons of interest. We thought we were under contract Saturday night when we went to bed with an all cash offer, 4,000 less than asking price. When we woke up Sunday morning, our realtor told us that the buyers never signed the counter offer. So then we had another offer. For full price, no closing costs. Then the realtors put out a notice to the potential buyers called a multiple offers notice where they say, bring your highest and best offer. We ended up getting over our asking price, no closing costs. It was a crazy 24 hours!

Of course we benefited from the current seller's housing market and the location of our home, but I really think if we hadn't listened to our realtors, things would have turned out very differently.

I'll miss our house where we brought our boys home from the hospital and the only house where Henry ever lived. We'll always have memories there, but we're looking forward to creating new memories in our new house! One lesson I learned throughout this process is to go ahead and do the things you want to do to your house when you move in, that way you can actually enjoy it the whole time you're living there.