Under Contract

A few weeks ago we decided that time was ripe to put our home on the market. Since then, it has felt like a whirlwind of organizing, cleaning, packing and prepping our home for showings. We started the process on Monday afternoon for initial showings that were to begin Friday morning and last until Sunday afternoon (theoretically).

Anyone who watches HGTV knows the importance of staging a home to look as perfect and ADORABLE as possible! You want to maximize each room with furniture placement to seem larger and more inviting. Overly-cluttered, messy, lived-in spaces are not as appealing. And while we aren't terribly messy, we do LIVE in our home and its rare for everything to look top-notch all the time. Now the only person I know who is capable of making a house look perfect 100% of the time is my mother (shout out to Nana Chris!). Her nickname is the polish cleaning lady! But for the rest of us, its a bit more difficult to stage a home and live in the home at the same time.

Example: if you need a glass of water, you have to wash it, dry it and put it away followed by a complete wipedown of the sink. As opposed to just plopping it in the sink for a later time to dispose of or clean or whatever your taste may be...so yeah...a bit of a pain!

So knowing that we had our work cut out for us, we went to town on every room; emptying everything out, wiping it down until it looked sparkly and new and then closing it off from our use. We started with small spaces like the extra bathrooms and eventually worked our way up to major living areas of the home, ending with the kitchen (since we use that space more than any other in our home). I went the extra mile by adding decorator pieces, fresh flowers and other odds and ends to enhance the spaces and hopefully win someone's heart!

The calls and emails for showings started to rack up Thursday night and we even got an offer, sight-unseen, for $5000 over listing. So we knew we had something special here and decided to hold off to see if we could do better. After the showings started, word hit the real estate market in Boulder and things started to blow up, (we ended up having 35 showings, most of which were on day 1).

Obviously, we were not allowed to be home for much of the weekend. Friday was spent by the normal workday followed by a hike and picnic at Chataqua to pass the time until the last showing at 6pm. Our Saturday flew by as we were gone from 8AM until midnight climbing at Movement Climbing Gym in Denver, then visiting with our friends, Tim & Brit, grilling, drinking and having a grand ol' time. Sunday we only had a few showings, so we went out for a late breakfast to our old hangout, The Huckleberry in Old Town Louisville, went for a walk and performed a smallish shopping BINGE at REI.

At 5pm on Sunday, our agent (and friend!), Courtney showed up to our front door with a 6-pack and smile from cheek to cheek with a pile of great news. We had several strong cash offers but the winning buyers took the cake by quite a bit AND requested our place entirely furnished; which is EXACTLY what we could have hoped for. Seeing that we are about to move into a slightly less then 200-square-foot sailboat...we couldn't have been happier.

Our plan of buying the largest and cheapest property we could find in a strong housing market; investing in a huge renovation with the plan of selling quickly at a profit; looks like it will pay off far more than we could have dreamed.