This Damn House

This evening I painted the hallway.

Normally I find painting a very satisfying task: once the job is done, it makes everything look so good!

But this is the second time I've painted this hallway in 4 months. The first time I turned 10 years of horror grey-once-was-white into pristine sunny yellow. This time I turned 4 months of horror brown-once-was-sunny-yellow into...pristine sunny yellow.

Actually it was still pristine sunny yellow except for a strip from 2 to 4 feet high the length of the hallway on both sides, which was filled with hand and finger prints the color of mud, grape jelly and Cheetos.

This painting task was decidedly less satisfying than the last time.

I had been hoping that this task on the to-do list would never rise to top priority but today my realtor, reporting on the open house, said "Comments were about 95% positive, which is great. Several people did comment on the hallway paint, though."

So much for escaping that one, eh?

The realtors open house went swimmingly this morning, we hear.

To celebrate, here are some last-year v. today shots...

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We've come a long, long way, baby.

Get set...
GO!

The front stoop, before and after:

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Now to be honest, this pretty stoop was not our original plan. In the interest of both time and money, we had asked our neighbor/contractor to put in a simple cement block, perhaps topped with flagstone or pavers or tiles or something, for a cost of $600-800 or so. We wanted a second opinion though, so we found this guy who had a great rep and said he did concrete. So he came to take a look -- turns out he's more a mason than a concrete guy. His proposal -- complete with cut bluestone -- was definitely the more expensive option, by a factor of two. But it sounded great, and the end result looks great...and in the end I think when selling a house that the front yard and stoop make a lasting first impression, so I think it's worth it.

Some of you wanted to see how the staging consultant turned our kids' room into a family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room.

Kids' room:

Family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room:
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9 months ago:

2 days ago:

This afternoon:

I fall down go boom now.

5 days till market, and counting.

On Friday, our friendly local staging consultant came by, courtesy of our realtor. she spent nearly 2 hours walking through our house with us, telling us "all shelves and storage should be 30% empty" and "put a throw rug here to help guide people into this room this way instead of that...maybe a dark red to pick up the bricks" and "you can make that table look smaller by putting a large bowl of fruit as a center piece".

The heart of her advice was: people don't buy houses rationally -- "this house suits our family's needs" -- rather, they buy the house because it suggests a lifestyle they would like to have. So stage the house to pander cater to people's fantasies. The living room, for instance, should cluster around the fireplace, not the TV, because even though in real life people will focus on the TV, they like to imagine themselves clustered around a fireplace. Hide the meds -- people aren't sick in their fantasies -- and show the sporting goods -- "when we move into this house, we'll be healthy, active people!"

Two bits of advice caught us particularly off-guard.

One, the big room in the back with the gorgeous windows -- which we use as a kids' bedroom/playroom -- we should stage as a recreation room/great room/family room. I objected on the grounds that 1) our kids need a place to sleep, even while we are selling the house, and 2) making the house a 2 bedroom drops its market value precipitously. The compromise was that while the room will still serve as a bedroom, both practically for us and for the purpose of listed as a 3BR home, we will decorate so as to suggest a great room. We tuck all the bedroomy looking items way in the back...and front and center we add some chairs and couches (clustered around, yes, the fireplace) and adult-oriented artwork (not "adult", just not primary colors of zoo animals :-). Two rooms in one!

Two...the room we carefully cleared out to make our brand new gorgeous dining room she doesn't actually buy as a dining room; it's really more like an eat-in-kitchen. So on her suggestion we moved the dining room back to where it's been for the last 10 years: in the living room. But we artfully arrange the furniture to suggest two rooms -- living room and dining room (again with the living furniture clustering around the fireplace). So now we have this odd but endearing layout:

Surprisingly...it actually works!

Signed with our realtor today. MLS listing goes live next Wednesday. Realtor open house on Thursday. General public open house the following Sunday.

EEEEEK!

Last week, we saw a For Sale sign go up on the house two doors down from ours. Naturally, we looked it up; the stats were very similar to our house in terms of number of rooms, square footage, lot size, features, etc. They were asking about $10K less than we were hoping to ask. AND they have a view of the pond. (Our house is only about 200 feet from the pond but our property doesn't actually front the pond and there's a rise blocking to view.) ACK!

Then today we saw that there's a SALE PENDING notice on the For Sale sign. Sale pending?!? In less than 7 days?!? If that sale goes through, that's good news for us in many way!

Our 4 page To Do list is down to less than a page! And tomorrow is the grand unveiling of our new STOOP! I can't wait to see what it looks like.

Our realtor said we could take our own listing photos. This is cool because it means I can stage one room at a time and take the pics, rather than have to get the house in show condition 4 days early just for photos. It's also fun.

So here are some possible listing photos:
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As if the sod we laid last year wasn't bad enough.

What price my conscience?

Mulch is good. Mulch keeps the soil moist and your plants' delicate roots warm in the winter. It prevents weeds and reduces erosion. And if it's organic mulch (rather than, say, gravel) it composts itself right there in your flower bed, adding its life force back into the system.

Here in New England we have an abundance of nature's own mulch: leaves. In our case, pounds and bushels and heaps of oak leaves. year after year, I raked leaves into the flower beds, spreading them around and patting them down to ensure an even coat. On top, a crisp, crunchy brown layer, reminiscent of bread crumb topping on a casserole. On the bottom, the moist fecund layer of decomposition.

Except that piles of leaves don't look like mulch / compost to your neighbors and potential buyers...they look like trash. They say "someone lives here who doesn't take care of her flower beds."

So this weekend I hauled out a metric buttload of oak leaves, both crispy brown and soft fertile black, and replaced them with shredded bark from some pine trees from who knows where, which had to be delivered by truck and then distributed by shovel and elbow grease. They too are breadcrumbs atop an eventual layer of composting ambrosia, but with a much higher carbon footprint and wear and tear on my back.

What's the point?

9 months ago, the area behind our garage looked like this:

6 months ago, it looked like this (note the green sludge):

Thanks to a loaner power washer, it now looks like this:

Sorry, that's all you get tonight.  Pretty much every waking moment is currently being spent on either paying work or house prep.  No time for blogging, alas.