Selling a house

It is official that we are now homeless. Our house settled on Friday, and whilst our bank account looks very impressive, we are without a home.

That does however mean that we sold our house...within less than a week!

In January we had a real estate agent come around to do a market appraisal and give us an indication of how we should go about things.

We were pleasantly surprised by what he indicated price wise, and he said what we were expecting him to say about things to be done around the house. Which I am now passing onto you.

* Finish all the small jobs you have been meaning to do, before you list it for sale. If a buyer sees that something is half finished they will try to negotiate the price down.

* Freshen up the front of your house. Plants are reasonably cheap, replace the dead ones with live ones. Paint the front door, and if you have the time/need, paint the front of the house. Mow your lawns. Buy a new door mat.

* Remove all the clutter. Then remove more. Clean out your cupboards, store things in the shed. Hire a storage shed if need be. Don't shove things into cupboards and hope that no-one looks, it is the first thing I do when I look through a house, I look at the storage.

* Clean like your life depends on it. Get rid of cobwebs. Clean the windows. Dust. Vacuum under the bed. Clean your bathroom like your mother in law is coming to visit.

Further to that
* Meet several agents and pick the one you find suits you best. Enquire about their commission rate, marketing strategies, policies on how they handle offers on your property.

* Don't overprice your house. Our neighbours overpriced their house by $50,000 on the off chance someone would pay that amount. It was for sale for 14 months. Our agent said the best time to sell a house is within the first 4-6 weeks of listing it. After that people start to think there is something wrong with it.

* Get quality photos. I have lost count of the times I have looked at photos online and promptly closed the browser because the photos were crap. I hate houses that only show you the outside of the house, not the internals.

* Organise your paperwork straight away. Get your solicitor to do your Section 32 so your agent can pass it on to prospective buyers right away. I have been after a Sec 32 on a house we're looking at for 5 weeks now. 5 WEEKS!!!
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Forgive me

Please forgive the lack of posts of late, my house currently looks like this:

It is hard to believe we could pack up our entire house and shed into one 6x3m storage unit. Then again, there is still a fair bit of room, that white thing on the left is actually our lounge suite base, and there is currently a 1metre squared patch of bare floor space.

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Garden Beds

Whilst on leave the husband and I recently made some garden beds for the front of the house.

We chose to do a simple design that followed the line of the concrete. I figured it might give a nice formal feel to the house. Probably not, but anyway...

It was a simple cut list, I measured the back of the beds (the veranda), and the sides of the step, and then worked out how wide I wanted the beds to be (30cm) and went from there. We used 50mm treated sleepers, so factoring in that width I had a cut list. It worked out that if I thought about what bits to cut from what lengths, I could get away with only using 2.5 sleepers per bed.

They sat empty like this for a couple of months until we could be bothered getting dirt to fill in the beds. Given the house is in a general state of disrepair, ugly garden beds weren't overly concerning to the look of our house.

We brought extra soil to fill in around the garden beds and to even up our lawn. We have the plants go in them, we want to paint the front of the house and do the roof before we plant them though, so they are sitting in the outdoor area for now.
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Paint it black

(as a 'I-didn't-really-need-to-know-that-fact' fact, I love that song, and it may have slightly inspired my choice of paint colour for our house).

I finally got around to painting the timber on the side of the front door. Not that you can see it behind one of the plants, but it's there.

On a side note, do you think I need to paint the bits around the door at the top?
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Let the light shine in

We are one step closer to finishing our veranda renovation - we removed the tin. It was actually a lot harder than we thought it would have been, as they were all linked together or something. I can't say I was paying that much attention due to sitting under a tree watching the husband work baby wrangling.

We are still debating if to have a bullnose or straight angled roof. I am leaning towards straight just because it would be cheaper, but bullnose would look better. We need to add some more timber beams to the frame and paint it, so we have time to make a decision.

I never realised how much light was being blocked by the roof, our hallway is so bright now! Apparently the flashing is going to be a bitch to fix, so we are on the quest to find a man to finish it. Suits me, as I want this done for Christmas and the weekends are running short. Of course, that means we need to find a man who can do the job quickly.

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Postie

Pinterest

I love our postie, she is awesome! Not long after I returned to work after uni she started putting our parcels in a more secure location, as she was concerned about them being taken during the day as we live on a busy street across from a school.

Now that I am home during the day she makes sure that she knocks on our bedroom window rather than the front door incase Eliza is asleep. And when Eliza is awake she always takes her for a quick cuddle whilst I sign for my goods.

I will miss her when we move!
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Keys

One of the things that always annoyed me about our house was the keys. There was a key for the front door, another for the back door, another for the dining room door, complete with a seperate key for the screen door. And then there was another two for the shed! So on my keyring I had 6 keys for our house, plus another 3 for my parents houses, and my car key.

So we decided to have the locks changed and keyed alike. The husband's best mate knew a bloke (gotta love how small towns work, everyone 'knows a bloke' to get things done) who was a locksmith and could do the job for us. All it took was a couple of hours and a couple of pineapples, and we were set.

It is so much easier to find the right key to get into our house now.
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A New Addition

WARNING - This post may distress some readers, especially if you are as scared of mice as I am.

I have an irrational fear of mice. I don't like them, can't be near them, and will scream at the sight of a mouse. I am petrified of mice. On my list of fears it goes something happening to my baby, something happening to the husband, and then mice. So a mouse plague is a lovely thing for me. Which is why I have found the end of the drought to be rather distressing, it means that there is now a mouse plague. Ok, so the drought ending was good for the farmers, but really bad for me. It was alright in our household, I hadn't spied a mouse.


Until one lazy sunday when I laid down for a mid-morning nap I layed down and heard our cat running around like an idiot, so got back up. We the husband had put a few traps down (and hidden behind things so I didn't have to look at them), and I couldn't hear the cat meowing, so I figured she had seen a mouse and was chasing it. I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I got up: a mouse had been caught in a trap and she had dragged the trap and mouse to the middle of the lounge room and deposited it in the middle of the rug. I burst into tears and rang the husband (who was out cutting wood at the farm). Apparently he didn't find an already dead mouse a good enough reason to come back into town, so I was left to my own devices. It was lucky that I had clean clothes in hand, and a phone at the back of the house, as I wasn't going back into the lounge room. I rang a friend's husband to see if he could deal with the mouse, but unfortunately he wasn't home. I decided to have my shower, calm down a little and hash out a plan.


Whilst in the shower I decided on a genius plan of getting my bogan neighbour to deal with the mouse. So I got dressed, brushed my hair, and walked next door to ask him to deal with it. Let's just say he was very gracious and least stifled his hysterical laughter until after he had removed the mouse from my house and was walking back to his house.
So just when I am finally feeling safer in the house again, and had calmed down enough to be able to sit on the lounge, another two make an appearance (could have been the same mouse, but I doubt it, one looked fatter). I burst into tears and yelled at it to stay behind the bookcase where it has made a nest. It didn't listen to me, so I grabbed my laptop and phone and drove out to my mums house. 


I rang the husband on the way out, and told him about the mouse. He promised to deal with it when he got home, moving the bookcase and cleaning behind it. He also made the wise move of gooping around the fireplace with No More Gaps where we think the mice were getting in. 


Fingers crossed it works as let's just say that going back to work is looking mighty appealing compared to spending a day screaming at a mouse.
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Spare Room - The Beginning

Being the last room to be renovated in our house means that we notice how shabby it really does look in there. This is what it looked like when I finished spring cleaning

So here is the plan:
* Remove the 50 year old floral carpet. Oh what a shame, I do love that carpet, with its 50 years worth of dust and germs in it.
* Strip all the masonite from the walls
* Remove the window, and replace it with a double hung double window (same as the one in the master bedroom)
* Replace a few weatherboards that are looking a bit shabby on the outside
* Put noggins in the wall joists
* Build a small robe behind the door
* Lower the ceiling from 12 foot to 9 foot.
* Insulate the walls
* Upgrade the electrics. This room seriously only has one single plug power-point in it. The bedside lamps and phone are just for show! The husband, being a sparky, will put in more power-points, downlights and a ceiling fan.
* New plaster
* New paint
* New carpet
* New curtains

Hopefully this room will be relatively straight forward, and cause minimal disruptions to our lives, given we don't use this room. Fingers crossed
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Bathroom Painting - ALMOST TICK!

Before (these were taken last year prior to the kitchen reno, hence the old lino): 

Now:

The flat white paint was a huge mistake in our bathroom. I really don't know what I was thinking when we painted it. I blame it being one of our first renovation gigs!

Given the rest of our house is Dulux Hogs Bristle Half, we decided to paint the bathroom that colour to keep it consistant (it also means we don't have millions of half empty paint tins in the shed - much to the husbands delight, more shed space for him). Our bathroom comes off our kitchen, so to keep things flowing nicely. The green feature wall has stayed, though it needs touching up in a few places. I am still in love with that colour, even after 4 years

So there you go, a freshly painted bathroom. It is a warm and inviting now, rather than clinical and cold feeling, which is a nice change, given we are coming into winter! Now to paint the trim and put the laundry door back on its hinges.


PS - Want to see how our bathroom started out back in 2006? Read it here! Pin It

Window Painting - TICK!

This week at our house it was all about the front window.

It went from this:

To this:

Unfortunately, painting the window frame has shown me how much the rest of the house needs painting! Luckily, I don't have a cherry picker in the back shed, so that was a task for another day!

Yet another thing crossed off the list:

• Paint the insides of our bedroom window. We currently just keep the sunscreen blind down to cover over it!
• Whilst the brushes are out, we need to paint the outside of the bedroom window. The olive green is starting to get to me now.
• Paint around our front door.
• And paint the arcitrave and skirting boards in the kitchen. 
• Whilst we're in the kitchen, we might as well tile.
• I started painting the Laundry in August, and well, that is as far as it went. I still need to finish painting the rest of the bathroom.

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Paynesville - Part 3

So, onto my favourite part of our trip to Paynesville: house stalking.

It's always nice to see how the other half (the richer) live :)
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A Kitchen Update

I am loving that I live in Victoria this weekend, as it is Labour Day weekend, which means 3 days off! Very handy if you want to tile your kitchen and bathroom.

Excuse the mess on the benches, it has been raining and everything had to come inside. And I am yet to clean all the excess gunk from the tiles.

We ran into a few issues along the way. Like our slab being less than level in the bathroom. It is workable, just a bit more fiddly than desired. And then there was the skirtings in the bathroom, which had to be removed, and eventually replaced. Oh, and how could I forget the realisation that our washing machine has been leaking water, and caused some dampness in the wall. Nothing is ever simple in our house!

We still have a few tiles to lay, mainly all the fiddly ones that require lots of cutting (and swearing as we break more tiles), and the grouting to go, but we're hoping it will be done by tomorrow night. Then comes doing all the skirtings. AGAIN!

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Kitchen Tiles - TICK!

I finally made a decision about tiles. Emphasis on the I. The husband wasn't convinced by their darkness, but given his recent complains about the kitchen being too cream, I like the contrast.

Best thing, I ordered them on Saturday morning, and recieved a phone call on Tuesday saying they had arrived. Which means I now need to convince the husband that we need to spend a weekend on our knees for the fun of it :)

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House Update

Not alot has been happening around the house.
Actually nothing has happened for some time. Do you ever work so hard on something, and then just give up as it has become overwhelming? Or is that just me?

This year has become maintenance year. The year where there are no major tasks planned, and we just finish things off.

So far on our list we have:

• Paint the insides of our bedroom window. We currently just keep the sunscreen blind down to cover over it!
• Whilst the brushes are out, we need to paint the outside of the bedroom window. The olive green is starting to get to me now.
• Paint around our front door.
• And paint the arcitrave and skirting boards in the kitchen. 
• Whilst we're in the kitchen, we might as well tile.
• I started painting the Laundry in August, and well, that is as far as it went. I still need to finish painting the rest of the bathroom.

If we really put our heads down, and worked hard, we could have it done in a couple of weekends. But alas, the husband and I have the world's most spasmotic social life, that goes from zero to 100 in three seconds, and at the moment it is in the 95 category. We have birthday parties, and weddings invites flowing in, not to mention some major projects at work. So we're just taking it one day at a time. Hell, I have lived looking at my half painted skirting boards in the lounge room for 15 months now, a few more won't kill me ;)
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A look back at our garden

2005

2010

I was cleaning off my hard-drive today, and found some old photos of our house from when we moved in.

Crazy garden - gone
Ugly yellow house paint - gone
Stupid fence and gate that did nothing - gone
Plum tree - gone
Ugly looking fence behind the garden - gone.
Garden shed built - done (ok, so it doesnt have a concrete base, it just sits on the stones, but its good enough to store our bikes in).

A lot has changed in five years.
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You Light Up My Life

After much debate about this lamp, I ended up purchasing this one from Adairs.

I should explain that I didn't come up with this awesome idea myself, I borrowed it from the awesome John and Sherry at Young House Love. I loved how they put seasonal things in theirs, and thought it was something I could do myself, with things we have around the house.

And I must say, it has come up a treat! So much so that I am going back to get a second one this week for the other side of the lounge room.

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Looking back at our back yard

2005

2010

Looking back at old photos makes me remember how many cars we have had. Not one of those cars is still in our ownership *hides* There has also been several others.

But, 5 years has brought us a side fence, gates, the removal of a garden bed, the creation of a dog run, a 3 car carport, a stone driveway, a whole heap of boring things in the shed, and a (somewhat patchy) lawn. I didn't realise we had done so much around our house, as I tend to focus on the big things and forget the little things.

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