It's been six very eventful months since we've updated our blog and I hope to spend some time over the next few days to catch you all up on what we've been up to.
We spent the better part of January, February and March preparing our house so we could put it on the market. I watched probably 50 hours of "Designed to Sell" on HGTV and did my best to copy what I saw there. Here's how everything turned out:
Here's the foyer/living room. We painted it one color, hated it, then painted again a couple of days later. (Just for the record, I don't recommend ever doing it that way. If you know the color is wrong, stop painting, go back to the store and get what you want). I bought new curtains, throw pillows, accent chairs, a mirror, a lamp shade and decorative items and took down most of the paintings we had on our walls. We spray painted the gold lamp a metallic black, as well as the light fixtures on the wall (you can't see them well in the picture). I also frosted the glass on the light fixtures with some special spray paint. We had to hire a guy to come fix the ceiling where it was wet and warped from the leaky bathroom upstairs.
In the dining room, we scraped that awful wallpaper, painted, added some black decorative wall hangings and some plants, painted the frames of the artwork we left up, added a rug (from one of the upstairs bedrooms), replaced the curtains with the ones we had previously hanging in the living room, and got rid of the china cabinet.
We scraped wallpaper in the kitchen, painted, replaced the refrigerator, reupholstered the chairs, decluttered and added a few red and orange decorative items.
In the family room, I replaced the curtains, cleaned the carpet (it was white underneath all that dirt) and recovered the throw pillows.
We renovated both bathrooms, ripping out the laminate floors and replacing them with tile. One floor was much harder than the other because we had to replace the subflooring because the wood was wet and rotting. We replaced the vanities and mirrors, replaced light fixtures, scraped wallpaper in full bathroom and replaced the tile wall in the full bathroom with wainscoting. It was a long and painful process and I plan to never do anything like it again, but our bathrooms looked a million times better and I think added a lot of value to the house.
The master bedroom got a paint job, new curtains, rug, bedspread and lamps.
The guest room just needed some new paint.
We said goodbye to the dinosaurs painted on the wall in the boys' room, got rid of their yucky rug and replaced it with a little braided rug, bought new bedspreads an packed up most of their toys.
We didn't do much in Calvin's room-- just packed up the books and decluttered.
When we bought the house, I just knew the square footage that showed on the city records was wrong. Before we listed, I measured myself and it came out about 250 sq ft more than what was listed. So I hired an appraiser to get an official measurement and she measured it at about 275 sq ft larger than what the records showed. Mo money for us!
So, the boys and I kept the house scrupulously clean for about five weeks and we were able to sell the house in a lousy market for a decent profit. We feel so blessed because even now, a lot of the houses that were on sale at the same time as ours are still on the market.
We all loved our home, and it was really hard to leave. We miss our friends in Syracuse and have so many great memories of our five years there. I, however, will not miss the snow.
