Next Is The Hard Part of Moving

Getting an accepted offer really turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was getting our house ready to sell. It wasn’t just hard, it was an extremely insane type of hard.

Once the kitchen was emptied out, I decided to start upstairs and work my way down.

It’s really difficult to describe how much stuff was in the house. Every time I thought that a pile of things wasn’t too big and would be easy to pack up, there would be like ten times the amount of stuff that I thought.

It was like layer upon layer and there were a lot of layers.

I would try to get rid of things as I went along but that wasn’t happening fast enough.

Every time I asked someone for help, they were too busy or sick or whatever.

Even when they did help, I would say everything has to be out of the room and there would still be things left. Well, it’s just this or that. Well, they can’t stay! And that’s actually a lot of things.

On one particular day, I must’ve made over 50 trips up and down the stairs. You know how after a particularly hard workout your legs kind of give out? That’s where I was by the end of the day.

I was ready to give up and call the whole thing off. Even after saying it though, I just get keeping on.

It seemed like the hard part was only just beginning.

The realtor would be over in a few days and it seemed like there were months of work left.

After a room got emptied, there was a ton of work in each room that still needed to get done. The carpets upstairs were especially bad. Years of spilled soda and candy were forever stuck to the carpet. Holes in the doors. Holes in the walls. Missing closet doors. We even had two patches of spilled paint.

When you have all that stuff, you can’t see all these problems and they were definitely problems. Big problems.

We weren’t going to have time to fix all this stuff. We only had a few weeks left to sell and time was flying by.

I learned so much in those first few weeks:

• Maintenance is very important
• Prevention is key
• Some stuff is pretty cool but it’s a lot of work to move it around
• Book hoarding is something that needs to be curbed right away because those suckers are HEAVY!!
• Clean up carpet spills right away
• Replace doors with holes
• Vacuum a lot
• Clean often
• Do not have a “storage room”
• It’s embarrassing having people come over to help when the house has been neglected for so long
• A lot of the things that you’re saving because you think it has value, really doesn’t
• When you think you finally have enough money to move, double it
• Do not leave stuff sitting around outside in the yard
• When you start a project make sure you finish it (Read The One Thing if you tend to start many projects at once and then never finish any of them!)
• Declutter often
• You don’t need 5 of everything unless it’s something that you do

This is why it was the hard part – I was told this room was almost done:

If you can take of many of the things on this list before you even consider listing your house, you’ll be much better off than I was. This process could’ve been so much easier.

It was the state of the house when we started and the short time frame that made it so incredibly hard.

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