New Year Limbo: Selling Circus

It's a new year and we're in the 2014-2015 limbo of houses which makes me feel very unsettled.  This is not to say we are homeless at the moment, but we have been doing things to our current home (I can't even bring myself to call it "old" since it's only 3.5 years old, I mean come on, I have underwear older than that.  Note: I should really update my underwear.) to get it ready to go on the market.  These are not big things, but things that make it feel less like "us" and more "neutral" to the average observer.  

Case and point number 1: We said goodbye to the neon green door.  Mega sad face.

 

We also had a stager and photographer come by on Monday, at the direction of our realtor, and make a few tweaks to make the house more show ready.  Just getting the house to the point where it could be photographed, right after Christmas, made for a week in purge-atory (pun credit: Liz!).  And doing a mass purging with two kids at home bordered on insane. And frustrating.  And oh-my-God-how-did-we-accumulate-so-much-crap-in-3-years.  At this rate we will have to move every few years just to keep ourselves from drowning in junk.

For the record, these are just my own shots via phone camera, not the marketing shots.  They do that stuff up right with photoshopped blue skies and such.

 

Nope, no kids live here!  But if they do, they do not have any toys anywhere but in their bedrooms *cough, cough*.

The bar looks so barren without dozens of beer bombers being "aged" on the counter and at least 4 sets of keys and last week's mail pile which hasn't made it to the kitchen table yet.  But let's make ourselves a cocktail and crack some nuts, shall we?

Ok, we can on occassion make the kitchen look like this.  This is fairly legit.

No our kitchen table is never the staging area for backpacks, purses, laptop bags or mail.  Ever.  See?

Lilly owns at least 500% too many toys, and most of them are sitting in storage right now.  I'm kinda hoping they never come back.

This lasted 5 seconds before the kids started jumping on the bed.

It is amusing to me that when a bathroom is staged, you have to pretend you do absolutely no cleaning of yourself in the room where you actually clean yourself.

My side of the closet has never ever been free of this much "I don't know what to do with this so stick it in the closet" items.

We are not done, and have some serious headway to make in the garage de-clutter process, but the rest of it is manageable.  And I'll admit, I get a sick sense of satisfaction out of organizing drawers, so I'm not totally dreading that part.  We actually go on the market January 14th, and at that point our ability to get out of the house in the morning in any sort of timely fashion will be completely destroyed.  Here's to hoping for a quick and relatively painless sales process.  That is my new years's toast this year - Cheers!

I have been a bit conflicted about this whole process, leaving this house so soon.  That is probably obvious.  I have felt like we needed a way to commemorate what we built (literally and figuratively) in this house and so for Christmas, I came up with an idea and gave it to Andrew.  I had an artist do a watercolor painting of the house exterior for us to keep. 

I love the way it came out, and would love to do one for every house we live in over time (although I'm not going to rush on to the next one any time soon #famouslastwords).