Is anybody else trying to sell a house in a down market? It is so frustrating to keep a house in “show” condition when you have a three and one (almost) year old!
I have been trying to keep my spirits up by looking at new houses. If you could move, what would you change? I think I want a larger kitchen and I know I want a larger yard. Don’t laugh, but I want a large yard because I want a chicken! That and a garden.
Unfortunately my search for houses is going stale. After all, I have no idea where we will actually be moving to. It will probably be far from where we are at now though so we will be changing some of our furniture too.
Our couch is 8 years old now so we probably will not take that. I’ve been looking at home office desks too since that is the only piece of furniture that we have left from our college years.
Oh well, hopefully dreaming will keep my mind of actually selling the house!
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Heidi, We are on our 9th move, so we are in our 10th house. Get boxes, our boys loved them. I used apple boxes from HV and it worked great. Realtor calls and pack them up, I put them in the corner of the dining room and everyone thought I was organized, packing already ! ! They had not idea toys or ??? were in the boxes. Also, use a black marker and label each, Grandma’s china, wedding photo’s they will NEVER know !
What a great tip! We have lived 6 different places since we were married, but this is the first move with kids (and the longest in-between time since we have been here for over five years now).
Ohhh…I love house SHOPPING but I hate moving. I’m dying for a new kitchen. I have practically zero counter space. That’s my major complaint about the the house that we are planning on staying at for quite some time. Too bad kitchen remodels cost a FORTUNE and we can’t even justify it as an investment in this market. Ugh. Good luck with the sale of your house!
Thanks! Yeah – our kitchen is pretty small now too. We have lots of cabinet space though, just the counter space.
We will be moving at the beginning of June. Our son gets out of preschool on May 28 and my husband will do the ceremony for college graduation on June 3. We have already started packing. We have a huge piece of plastic over our back room and have started to put filled boxes in there. My husband works about 2 1/2 hours away from our kids and I, so he can help get things together only on weekends(he lives with my parents at the moment). It has been a trying time for about 2 years now just the kids and I without a car. (My friends help me with rides places I need to go or I walk, I mostly walk pulling a wagon with the kids riding, in the summer) I am excited to move and finally be with my husband again. 🙂
Oh my goodness, that would be really hard 🙁 We have some friends that have to do that for a few months – he is living a few states away though while his kiddos finish out the school year.
This is actually our 5th move in our 10 years of marriage. Our last move was with our son, when he was a year old. This is my daughter’s first move, we have lived in our current house for about 4 years
I am looking forward to that stage of marriage where I actually stay in a house for a long time! I hope that we are able to stay in our next house for 10+ years.
I moved a lot when I was young, but then we stayed in our last house from third grade on. My husband stayed in one house his entire life!
I don’t envy the house selling. We would love to move, but would be hard pressed to sell even in a good market just because we live in such a rural area with little prospects for work. What were we thinking when we moved here I do not know. 🙂 BUT, I can completely understand the chicken thing. We currently have 2 free-range hens with plans to expand. We had 24 two years ago and slowly culled, lost, or otherwise no longer have many of our chickens. I miss having a bunch roaming around the yard. And I really dislike having to buy eggs at the store again.
I can’t wait to get a chicken! I feel like such a dork, but you guys have made me feel so much better. It must not be as strange as I thought (at least among my readers!).
I’d love to wait out the market, but we really want to move near family. I love this area, but my family is 8 hours away and my husbands family is 20 hours away. It was much easier when there was the two of us and we could pop on a plane a couple to a few times a year to visit one and drive for a weekend to visit the other (they do not have an airport nearby!). We were still able to do it with one kiddo. Now, with two, it is MUCH harder. Too much to pack, four tickets instead of two (and plane rates have gone up anyway), trying to lug two carseats and two kiddos through an airport is horrible, but driving with an infant who doesn’t understand that we are driving somewhere (and not just tormenting him by making him sit in one spot for hours on end) is almost as difficult.
Plus, we need a date night, LOL! Babysitters are hard to find 🙂
Oh sweetie, TOTALLY understand! We put our house on the market Mid August (2010) FSBO w. 4 children under 7 and 8 mos preggo myself! With the intentions of selling the home and not being in a hurry since we weren’t in need to move, just out of space. I did some showings through craigslist people and accidentally found our dream home where we NEVER would have considered, But it had everything we wanted, land, size I finally get my chickens (yes I am just as odd as you!) and my garden will be huge compared to our former garden. When we found the dream home we put our house w. realtor dropped the price to lowest price we could and SOLD in 8 days (1st September)! So Kansas City isn’t slow on real estate! So don’t give up, and keep your eyes open to foreclosures that need alot of work cause you can get some steals! Oh and the whole showhouse thing, would have killed me if it were longer than that week. I thought I was going to lose my hair over every finger print and out of line bedspread. The house was in PERFECT show condition and it is HARD w/ little ones. The Wii became a good friend cause it wasn’t messy for them to play w. and easy to clean!
We have so much glass! Glass tables, glass doors, mirrors… I just hope that the people who look at the house don’t look at the two to three foot high area, LOL. Two seconds after I clean them I look down and there is another little handprint there!