Preparing to Sell

Once we knew I was pregnant, Kevin and I knew that we wanted to try and move into a bigger house by the time the kid came. Before he went to Hawaii we figured out what we could afford and looked at a few open houses. We developed a pretty good idea of what we wanted and what we could afford. But there wasn't much else we could do until he came home.

We hit the ground running when he did get home. We made a list of the work we knew needed to be done to the house (paint and new carpeting). We went to a few more open houses to make sure we were still on the same page. And then we met with a realtor to figure out some of the details.

The meeting left me reeling a little. It turns out there's a lot you need to do to get a house ready to sell. And considering that it takes 60 days to close we suddenly realized that we needed to move fast. Our to-do list exploded, our time frame shrank, and both of us are busy enough at work that we're not sure how it's going to all get done.

It was incredibly stressful for a while. I was already wondering if we could actually get into a new house in time to prepare for the baby, or if there would end up being a major crunch. But we made a to do list, and we've slowly been knocking things off of it all weekend. Most of the work right now is packing up stuff we don't need to get ready for an open house. This includes my library, a bunch of clothes, and a surprising amount of furniture and kitchen stuff.

At the moment our house is a mess of boxes and trash bags. Despite the way it looks, we've made good progress this weekend, and we're much more confident about our time table. The goal is to have the open house in three weeks, or at least be ready to. We won't put the house on the market until we're ready to make an offer, because we're expecting it to sell very quickly. But we want to be ready to pull that trigger at a moment's notice.

Now we just have to hope that everything else comes together. The goal is to be in a new place by August, which would then give us two months to unpack and prepare for the baby. Which should be enough time. If we can't get our act together, then it isn't the end of the world. We can have a kid in our current house, we'd just have to forfeit the guest room to do it. But we could make it work. I just hope we can get this all settled before hand.