Adventures in Selling/Buying a House

We decided about 2 months ago to put our house on the market and buy something bigger - something that we could accommodate an in law suite in the basement for my father in law.

Since there really aren't that many house in the area with inlaw suites, we will have to buy something with a basement big enough to have one built in it.

Since we are losing the basement to my father inlaw, we have to ensure we will have enough space on the two upper floors for all our junk.

While getting our house ready to list, I did get rid of tons of junk. Our real estate agent came by and told us what needed to be done to our house to have it showable.

We had the interior painted. Da man and my nephew painted the garage trim and outside front windows and trim.

I decluttered, cleaned the inside thoroughly, and packed as much non-essensials as possible.

It took us approximately 4 weeks to have the house ready to list. Our agent came and took pictures and got us up on the MLS site.

During this same time, we had been looking in the area for house that were for sale that we liked. We went and seen 5 or 6. We were really surprised that many didn't seem to have put inthe effort we had to make their house look clean and presentable. Many had obvious signs of disrepair.

At this point our house has had only two showing, it has only been listed for 5 days though. I think our agent was alittle optomistic with the asking price and I think next week we may have to reduce it a bit.

There is one house we do like, it is the right size and the price has recently dropped and it has been onthe market for a long time so they may even take less. It does need quite a bit of cleaning and minor repairs but nothing major and it is down the road from good friends of ours so that would be a bonus too.

So now our house is freshly painted and all nice and clean - it has to stay that way should we get a call to show the house. It is actually very nice to have it this way - but not so nice keeping it this way. I appreciate the result if not the effort.

So now we wait - our house was listed in the paper today so maybe we will have some calls for tomorrow. We can't very well make any offers on any other house until we actually have one on ours. Most agents recommend against accepting an offer on the condition of selling theirs.