House For Sale, Kids Negotiable (part 4)
09.2.2010 This is the final entry of a four-part series on the most pervasive and disruptive event we went through this summer: putting our house up for sale.
Now that our home was “show-ready”, we were faced with the oftentimes LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE of disappearing for open houses and showings.
Open House
An Open House is the easier of the two because they are planned well in advance. If your Realtor is fantastic like ours was, s/he will arrive twenty minutes before show-time and do a walk-through with a professional away. I’m thrilled, if not embarrassed, to say that our Realtor sent me a text message that she took the trash outside. Must have been those bananas at breakfast. Do not rely on your Realtor to do your work for you, however. It was ultimately our responsibility to make the house look as close to the condition it was when I first took those photos for the MLS listing.
Our agent was particularly proactive, so we had three open houses total, one per month. Open Houses are typically in the afternoon. Ours were held either between 2 and 4 or 3 and 5. Because our kids usually wake up around 230, on the day we had the 2-4 open house, we wore the kids out early so they could take their nap a little earlier. After we’d get them down to sleep, we’d make the house spotless again, get portable snacks ready for when they woke up, and when they did rise, we’d change a diaper and head directly to the car and leave. That is, if we were even in town.
Twice, we coordinated an open house with us being out of town, and on those weekends, we were faced with packing to leave town on a whirlwind trip AND SIMULTANEOUSLY getting everything in show-ready condition. I get dizzy just thinking about it.
Showings
The best way to assure traffic from interested parties is to be available at a moment’s notice, requiring no appointments, and maintaining the house in show-ready condition. For the most part, this is totally do-able.
Unless you have children. Children who still nap.
In fact, the best times for showings are weekday lunch hours. NAPTIME. And early evening. DINNER AND BEDTIME ROUTINE. So, yeah, no.
We tried to be flexible. And by “we”, I mean, we asked our nanny to take the kids to the park for an hour. During lunchtime. While it was 95 degrees outside. When Harper had a fever. And after talking to our nanny about it, I promised her I would never EVER put her (or our children) in that situation again. All that to say: don’t be afraid to put conditions on showings. Yes, you will get over-looked because you don’t fit with someone’s schedule. But consider the needs of your family first.
Conveying this to your Realtor might be a challenge, but ultimately YOU are the boss. We were fortunate in that our Realtor is also a mother of multiples that are only a year and a half older than our twins. Just be aware of the consequences of your restrictions. Pretty early on, our rules became:
- Showings preferred on days kids are at school, no appointment necessary on those days
- Showings on non-school days are allowed by appointment only
- Residents WILL be at home if showings are between 11:30 and 2:30 (lunch and nap) on non-school days
- Residents WILL be home for showings after 5:30
- NO showings after 7:00 p.m. (bedtime routine begins)
Because of the location of our home, even with all these stipulations, we still had what seemed like a constant stream of strangers poking around. Our nanny bore the brunt of the weekday showings, but we worked with her, listened to any needs or ideas, and compensated her for the extra effort. Weekend showings seemed easier because we were often able to escape to Jennifer’s parents’ house for a dip in the pool. Except for that one time…
Though I never actually wrote it down (I know, can you believe it?), it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a Showing Checklist for things like unplug/hide cords from television, all diapers in the diaper pail, shower curtain in kid’s bath drawn closed, lights on, doors opened, or whatever might otherwise forget as you’re frantically trying to get your family out of the house.
Where We Are Now
After nearly three months of the obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come with showing your home, we pulled our house of the market. Right around the time I was posting Part 2 of this series.
For real.
We were expecting an offer to come in, and that’s what spurred us to stay put. The housing market has a lot of inventory right now. Though at the price range where our home falls into, you get a fantastic residence for the well-priced home. Anything similar in features, detail, or amenities with slightly more square footage or slightly more yard throws a prospective buyer into a whole different price range.
So in a sense, it’s a blessing that our house didn’t move right off that bat, though not having an offer was far from only reason. There were other factors like a super tight lending market, getting in on the market after the usual spring fervor, the necessity to wrap your head around the living space and kitchen and master bedroom being upstairs and the spared bedrooms and laundry being on the ground level, there’s just not a lot of people looking right now, and I don’t know, the recession.
The thing is, we came to the conclusion that someone could put an offer with no allowances, no requests for closing costs, no questions asked, and at list price, and we were fairly certain we wouldn’t accept it.
We didn’t start out thinking like that. Obviously. Otherwise, why they hell go through all that? It’s just that it turned out I didn’t lose my job when my company merged with another, as I expected that I would. And I didn’t find anything in San Antonio, even though I had been looking. Since December. And though moving to a larger space for the dollar in the surburbs seemed appealing, my current employer has the right to let us go next May (it’s complicated). And if that were the case, I’d likely end up finding work downtown, where our home is already only 15 minutes away. And with the appreciation of home values in our area, we couldn’t afford to move back into our own neighborhood. The one we love.
In the last forty-eight hours that we’ve had the house off the market, the shoulders of everyone in our household, nanny included, have relaxed a little bit. I actually allowed myself the satisfaction of leaving my towel hanging over the shower door this morning.
Do we regret having gone through all the work only to decide not to sell? Absolutely not. I learned how expensive air conditioner coils can be, how to pick pea gravel, the value of a good handy-man, and how to research and then fix a leaky sink. We’ll move to a different space at some point, and when we do, we’ll know what it takes to do it with children in tow.
An unexpected side effect to all this was the twinge of sentimentality I felt about severing ourselves from this house, an odd feeling for someone who doesn’t usually attach emotional feelings for objects. But this is where our journey to conceive began, where sleepless nights shocked our systems, where the center of our universe shifted, where the kids took their first steps. I imagine years from now, if we’re not still here, we’ll drive by this house and the park down the way and share stories with the kids in the way that my own parents would do with the house I grew up in. I was too young to remember, but it’s pretty awesome to see the place where your life began.
In the meantime, we’ll go on creating memories. Right here at home.
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The entire series…
Part 1: Our Neighborhood. And the decision to sell our home.Part 2: Preparing the house for listing.
Part 3: Staging Our Home for showings.
Part 4: How we (barely) survived showings…and where we ended up.
Reader Comments (6)
Our home is for sale... preparing for an open house is much easier with older kids who can make beds, uncover the pool, and clean sinks. It's our dogs that make it really hard!
Seriously did not see that plot twist coming. At all!
But all good info as we are 100% certain we are putting an offer on a house when we get back. And probably not making it contingent on the sale of our house, which means carrying a double mortgage for awhile.
But
New house is about as perfect as I could hope for!
Oh my goodness, that was NOT the twist I expected!
Clearly, despite all that work, this was the right decision for your family right now. And at least you can feel more confident in that! But oof, what a hassle to go through!
Wow - thanks so much for taking all the time to post this series - it was really educational.
Wow. Well it's good that you didn't lose your job and I hope that whatever happens there it all works out the way you want it to. From the pictures (which are always fabulous) your house does look like a really nice house.
Thanks for all these ideas/tips. It's funny, the whole time I saw pictures of your house I kept feeling so envious and thinking, what an awesome house! So, now you get to stay in it a while, with the new great landscaping, etc.