How We Sold Our House on the 3rd Showing (REALLY!)

You know what they say, IT ONLY TAKES ONE. Well, I wanted the chance of finding that ONE to happen ASAP. Mostly because our new home was hinging on the fact that we needed to sell within a month.

Let me start at the beginning.

We had heard that the housing market was going to start turning in the favor of sellers. We also heard that interest rates on home mortgage loans were going to increase. I feel VERY lucky that we happened to buy our first house when the market was suffering (good news for us new home buyers) and wanted to take advantage of the market trends again while we could. So, we went out house shopping on a whim.

That whim turned into our realtor showing us the house of our dreams. We put in an offer that night (which happened to be Halloween) and got to work putting our house on the market. We laugh about how unprepared we were now that all is said and done.

Were we crazy for making an offer before our current house was even for sale? Probably. But I would much rather find the house of my dreams and work my butt off to sell my current house than to sell quickly and have nowhere to go.

I had been doing my research leading up to this moment because I knew that someday we wanted to move. Our first house (although I still have many fond memories of it) was bought with the knowledge that it was our “starter home“. When the time came that we needed to put our home on the market, I had an arsenal of tips and tricks that I immediately put to work.

The first thing that we did when we learned that we needed to take our house from “Yay, it’s Halloween!” to “No one lives here, this is your future home” status was to remove all personal photos from the walls and any sort of decor that wasn’t neutral.

After those personal items were gone, we still had work to do. We took almost everything out of our house except for the necessities. It was a TON OF WORK (thank you, Mom & Dad for your trailer!) but it was so worth it in the end.

Photos can make or break someone even taking the time to walk through your house these days. Don’t take that gamble with bad photos. Open all of the blinds, turn on all of the lights. The lights give off a bright, homey feel.

I credit our happiness to our incredible realtor. She went above and beyond to fight on our behalf when we had a buyer that wanted to run us through the ringer, plead our case to the people selling us our new home, and ultimately helped us get moved in to our new house without signing anything. She is THAT GOOD. Plus, we ended up making money off the sale of our old house which is practically unheard of these days.

Every wall scuff and every door smudge was no match to my Magic Erasers. I saved a ton of time on touching up the paint by scrubbing any smudges or stains on the walls (and trust me, there were plenty with this being the house Bean grew up in).

Once we took down all the personal items, there were quite a few nail holes left in the walls. I had almost an entire gallery wall to cover up! We patched up any noticeable holes and touched them up with paint.

One of the first things our realtor said to us was, “You need to get Bean a comforter”. Because we were still nighttime potty training her, we just had a thin, fuzzy blanket that didn’t make her room look very cozy. We went to Target and picked up a tufted pink comforter and that INSTANTLY made her bedroom look more cozy. Make sure every bedroom looks super cozy with a comfy comforter.

White looks clean, fluffy, and did I mention they look CLEAN? Pick up a few towels to stage your bathrooms. I would have loved to keep this look up if it weren’t for the fact that they got dirty looking so fast with kiddos 😉

No one wants to tour a house with dirty carpet. Without anyone’s previous advice, I knew this one would be huge. Our carpets were in pretty good shape, but they had also been with us through the endless spit-ups of a colicky baby. We did not have a dog, but dang does baby spit up stain carpet. I hired Zerorez based on referrals and was SUPER happy with how the carpets looked after.

We spent plenty of time looking around the front porch/entry of houses that we were touring as our realtor got the house unlocked. I noticed chipped paint, cluttered porches, dirty rugs, you name it. This is part of the first impression of your house! Make sure the outdoor entry of your house looks pristine. Stand at your front door and try to look around as a stranger would.

One of the other things that I noticed while touring other homes was the vacuum tracks in the carpet. I liked how the carpet looked as if we were the first ones to walk inside the house. On the flip-side, I was super curious about following the footprints in our house to see where they looked! haha You basically want your house to look “unlived-in”. Having a freshly vacuumed house helps achieve this look.

You want your home to look as cozy and inviting to potential buyers as possible. Especially if it’s an overcast day or if your showing is at night, turn on a few lights. Think about how you feel walking into a dark house. Now, think about how you feel walking into a house with a few cozy lights on. You get my point. And make sure if it’s dark that you turn on those front porch lights.