So we found the house of our dreams, now it was time to sell our own house. As usual, our planning skills left a lot to be desired. Our house was nowhere near ready to be put on the market. There was a long list of things we needed to do to get the house ready including cleaning the entire house, decluttering the basement, garage, and bedrooms, painting a few walls, and some yardwork.

We had 2 kids, aged 9 and 4 at the time so you know some of this list was easier than the others. Getting your kids to clean their rooms and put most of their toys in storage during the summer when they are off school was easier said than done. We were very lucky that our parents lived fairly close to us and helped out keeping the kids busy while we cleaned and prepped all of the bedrooms, purged the mass of boxes in the garage, painted a few spots on the walls that the kids used for an art studio, and cleaned up the yard to increase the curb appeal.

Then the fun began…

We had met with our real estate agent and came up with a price we wanted to list the house for when we were ready. This area of the city only had 4 or 5 different models of homes, so it was very easy to find comparables to base your price on. About 2 weeks into our preparations, the same model of house went up for sale on our street for less than we wanted to list ours for. Not the situation you want! And it had a nicer kitchen than ours too! We knew we had to adjust our price, but we still had a lot of work to do.

Then one night we woke up to the extremely strong smell of skunk. The next morning we found a hole dug under our front porch. Not what you want when selling your house! It smelled like they were living in our basement. That night my wife camped out on the front porch with a stereo and a water gun to try to scare the skunk away. We saw it leave, and quickly filled in the hole before it came back. The next night a new hole appeared at another spot of our porch. Skunk 1, us 0. We decided to call in the pros, and found an exterminator. They came, put in a one way door where the hole was, and set a trap. The next morning the trap was sprung and laying on its side, but no skunk. Skunk 2, us 0, exterminator 0. The exterminator came back and reset the trap. Finally they were successful and caught the skunk. They took it someplace to let it go, and we were able to get back to prepping our house to sell.

After almost a month of work, we were ready to put the For Sale sign up. We elected to lower our asking price to just below the house down the street, and then the waiting began.

The market had been fairly hot when we decided to sell, but in the time it took us to get our house ready, things had cooled a bit. The house down the street sold in a few weeks, and we hoped that whoever missed out on that house would come look at ours, but that didn’t seem to happen. Our agent informed us that the owners of the house we put the offer on had received another offer and were talking things over. Could this whole thing come crashing to a halt? All we could do was hope that our house would sell so we could satisfy that condition of our offer. A few days later, we were informed that the owners decided to reject that offer, as they really liked us and wanted us to have the house. They basically gave us all the time we needed to sell our house, as they were in no rush to sell. We couldn’t believe how lucky we were! After about a month, we finally got a good offer on our house that we accepted, and we were able to complete the purchase of our nice old house with the amazing yard!