Decisions...

So, hubs and I are currently deciding when and how to sell our house.

Yep-you read that right. This home that I've been blogging about setting up may soon be re-set up by someone else.
The market conditions are pretty good right now to sell it, and we'd make a good few dollars of it and the work we've put into it the last 7.5 months (has it really only been that long??). We both love this house, but if we eventually want to be mortgage free (or close to it) at an age younger than 85, we've got to keep moving on and building our capital.

So, this puts a lot of things into motion, which is kind of why I've been awol from the blogosphere.

First, we need to decide timing:
We'd like to move before the end of the year because we really don't want another mid-winter move and this winter looks like it's going to be a fairly busy one. So...that leaves us basically 4.5 months! We realize the number of people looking to move (us included) is limited in December with Christmas and the chaos that surrounds it, so...we figure a November 1st-ish closing. We don't know how long it'll take to sell, so we figure we should list September 1st.

That's 14 days from now.

Our list of things to do before we list/show:

1. Completely finish all trim/caulking/painting trim (95% done)
2. Family room pot lights (85% done! Post to come)
3. Rug for family room(done and done! Post to come)
4. Organize garage & shelving(hubs just needs to get the wood and then we can work it)
5. Organize basement(Fortunately an August goal anyways and on my list for tonight)
6. Fix & Iron master drapes(Slow process-they take a looong time to iron, so I'm 2/6 there)
7. Electrical for Master TV(should only take DH about 30 mins or so)
8. Hardwood in upstairs hallway(yee!)
9. Staging (move some stuff around, pretty it up and clean)

I'm sure there's oodles we're missing on there, but that's the bare minimum. I have a write-up done and we'd need to take pics of course once the above list is done.

Since we're waiting until after we sell to buy a new place, there's not technically a rush. If for some reason, there aren't any bites, or we're not getting what we're looking for, we can reconsider since we haven't already bought a place. Do you think that's smart, or are we shooting ourselves in the foot either way?

Therein lies one of the big problems I'm wrestling with today. There's NOTHING out there to buy! Seriously, no wonder it's a sellers market---there's no inventory!

I've been on MLS and Grapevine (the local FSBO authority) very regularly lately, and there's nothing. nada. zilch. Not a thing that appeals to us. Remember-a potential new place has stiff competition in our current home.

Well, let me correct that. There's nothing in our target price range, in our target area and with our target criteria out there currently.

In order to make money off the next house, it needs to be cheaper than this one sells for and have room for improvement (hubs is quite handy, have I mentioned that?). Plus, we like the area near and around where we live right now, and we don't really want to live downtown or much more East than we do now. Does that mean we have to move to the boonies? Kemptville? Manotick? Munster? Arnprior? Carleton Place? How far is too far? Clearly a personal decision and one we've been wrestling with a lot in the past couple weeks.

Another problem? We're cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. So we'll be FSBOing it again. No problem-I'm pretty sure our house shows very well and I can handle some open houses. This time though, the cats are staying. Their stuff can be put away, but we're not dealing with that BS again now that there's plenty of room for them to hide in the meantime.

However, with a potentially rushed purchase, do I enlist a realtor? Is that shady---selling it ourselves but then getting someone to help us buy a new place? They may know of better ways to search, better questions to ask us to determine our ideal home, not to mention make the process a lot easier. We've never bought an 'old' house before, only new construction, so a realtor could really help there.

Anyways, there are clearly a lot of decisions we'll be making in the very (very!) near future and, hopefully a lot of progress I'll remember to photograph to post here.