The one thing I have to say though, after putting in probably more than 60 total hours of cleaning, I'm frustrated that a few things ended up the way they did. When Dan came to take the photos, he had us take the dog dishes up off the ground, and so I put them on the counter that was behind him while he took it, so they wouldn't be in the shot. Well, I guess he came back and shot it again from a different angle and didn't bother to either move them or ask me to move them. So you can clearly see two dog dishes on the counter looking weird and cluttery.
This is insanely annoying if you knew how much stuff was previously on our counter and how I killed myself to get it PERFECTLY CLEAN!!!! He also had us take the magnets and photos off the fridge, which I can't believe didn't occur to me. (It was probably the saddest thing I've done thus far. Having Stephen gone is hard enough without taking all of our family photos down. They are like lovies to Ben. We sit and look at the fridge and talk about all of our family members at least once a day ...) Anyway, now I don't even have photos of papa around that we can say goodnight to. :-(
Anyway, back to yesterday. I took them down, but didn't do the ones on the side of the fridge because he was standing in the main doorway and you couldn't see them in the shot. Well, guess what. Again, he must have come back later, shot another photo from a different angle and all the remaining clutter is clear as day. Le sigh. And if you ask me why we didn't just do it all before he came, I will seriously have to jump through the internet and strangle you.
Getting our house to look this good nearly killed all of us, especially Ben, who kept inventing new levels of trouble to get into in order to get some attention. It was murder on Saturday. By the time it was crunch time, (like after 7 p.m. on Saturday and we still had to drive all the way to Kent so Stephen could get up and go to work first thing in the morning) we were all about to lose it. There were definitely some tears shed trying to get a few last minute things done and keep everyone from melting down. There was literally no time left to do any "one last thing." We didn't even take the time to eat a family dinner. Ben snacked on weird things and then started refusing to eat anything because his blood sugar was low and he was tired and cranky. We ended up going through the drive-thru on our way out of town and letting Ben eat some chicken nuggets in the car. He was a lot happier after that.
But luckily, when Ben and I got back to Aberdeen yesterday at around 2 p.m. (he napped in the car like a champ, yay!) the weather was nice (what? no, say it again) so we were able to spend some time doing some last minute weeding. About 20 minutes of yardwork made a tremendous difference and Ben was as good as gold for all of it. He used a screwdriver to dig in the dirt and helped me put the pulled weeds in plastic bags. What a sweetheart :-)
Our house:
From the front
Stained glass window, close up
From the back, with the hot tub sort of showing. I would have liked to have washed the cement a little, but it's January and we ran out of time. Oh well.
Upon entering. This is one of my favorite shots. Man it looks good in there.
This one came out pretty good too. See how the fireplace looks just fine without the glass panels?
Kitchen. YAY! This is what sold the house to me.
Kitchen. Too bad you can see a few dishes in the sink. I offered to take care of them really fast, but he said that he'd shoot it over them so they wouldn't show. Hmm.
Dining room and part of the kitchen. This is the one that shows the less clean part of the kitchen, which is frustrating because it WAS clean until I had to move things around for other shots that he didn't even end up using.
When we bought the house, this floor wasn't even there. Surely someone will fall in love with it in all its splendor and offer us a gazillion dollars, right?
The downstairs bedroom, which is technically the master, but we use it as our guestroom. (I can hear all of our previous guest complaining that it didn't look like that when they stayed with us. Sorry you guys! :-)
Our room. The shelving was $600 and Stephen screwed it into the wall, so its staying. It was a great idea since we lacked closet space, except that we never used it because I got dressed downstairs as to not disturb Ben and Stephen while they were sleeping. Oh well. Sometimes you just can't forsee these things.
(Oh, and if you look really closely, you can see Trick-or-Treat Bunny sitting on the shelf in the corner. Why he didn't move her out of the way before taking the picture? The world may never know ...)
This is Ben's room, which is really a lot cuter than is shown here. The things on the wall above his bed are glow-in-the-dark stars, and we also have wooden letters that say "BEN" but those aren't in the picture, for obvious reasons. :-)
Want to buy our house? Know someone else who might? It would make a great family home or a rental, whichever.
Here's the official listing ... fair warning. I did not see the text before it was posted, otherwise I would have copy-editted the hell out of it.
"Has a functional Hot tub, Nice back patio and deck area for BBQ or hanging out and entertaining."
Oh dear. Well, hopefully, people who are looking to buy homes aren't picky about things like appropriate capitalization and such.
It's also up on craigslist, which he swears is effective, even if there's no Aberdeen listings and it has to be lumped in with Seattle, which is two hours away ...
Oh, and of course there are two classified ads set to run in the paper tomorrow. I got them both for free :-)
4 comments:
Your house is charming. I've been out of the real estate biz for a year now, so I don't know what the market is in your area AT ALL, but it's got curb appeal, and you've done a nice job with staging it.
Take it from someone who's not only spent the bulk of her life in the industry, but has also bought three houses and sold two - this is one of the most stressful times your marriage will undergo, but you show such strength and love, I'm certain your little family will be the stronger for it at the end.
Good luck.
The market in our area is not so hot, but we are underpricing a little on purpose to try and combat that.
I really appreciate your commens. I'm less sure about the curb appeal, the outside is definitely one of the low points. I'm not sure if you can see it in the photos, but there are tire ruts in our grass from parking on the sidewalk. Gross.
Also, it bugs me that we painted the two pillars white but not the little triangle hat thing that goes over the porch. Stephen agreed with me that it would look better if that was white too, but that was way back in September and then it got too wet to paint. Oh well.
Hopefully, people won't look at the picky little details, they'll just say "Oh, look, honey! That one's cute" and then fork over lots of $$$$.
Thanks again for your imput. I do really appreciate it. It's nice to hear from someone who is educated on the subject.
your pictures are better than ours...our realtor chose to use the pics from the last owners instead of showing up in a timely manner to take some herself.
I probably shouldn't get started on that though.
If I was rich, and looking to move to the other side of the country, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
oh thank you! that's sweet. I agree that's a lame thing for an agent to do. I hope you decided to go with someone else ... as for us, no bites yet :-(
I know its only the second day, but the house-flippers explained that you get your biggest number of hits in the first week, and that's why we had to do all the cleaning and staging first, THEN put it up for sale.
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