Staging

So we've decided to not wait 6 months and put our house on the market now. Yes, at the worst possible time in history. When you want to sell your house you need to "stage" it.

Basically this means "fix all the junk you've been procrastinating on doing by playing video games". So the last week I've been busting hump to get all this fixed by tonight when our realtor walks through and gives us her blessing. This is a whole summer of work in 7 days (painting, patching, caulking, sanding, etc.).

Also as a part of the "staging" you need to purge any clutter or evidence that anyone besides Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons lives there. Finally, you need to set up flowers or bits of color (bowl of apples) to guide people's attention through the house. (Sigh) Now, once you have done the cleaning and set the house up for the non-color blind ADD buyers you need to keep it in this pristine state until your house sells. Um, right...

This supposedly raises our chances of getting an offer and makes people visualize themselves in the house without some other people's junk in the way. According to their statistics after the first 3 weeks a house is on the market the traffic drops off substantially. Most of the new traffic has passed through the house and are onto bigger and supposedly better "staged" homes possibly by Christo himself. Then you go into house purgatory and wait to be picked from the 24 other active listings we are competing against.

My idea is to lowball them all since it's going to cost us money if we sit for 6 months with the house and I am in North Carolina and Michelle is in Chicago. We may as well take the quick stab to the heart now rather than being bled slowly...