I think it's easier for some sellers than others. We were transfered often and sometimes we were only in a home for a year or two and a strong attachment was often harder to form. We've been in our current home for 7 years and I love it and this is probably about as emotionally attached as I have been. But having been through this a number of times I've learned to detach myself and start becoming more interested in my new home or home search. The more I become active and interested in the new locale, the less emotions tug at me and I can then look at my current home as more of a house instead of the home it has become. So my advice would be to look to the future instead of dwelling on your current home , knowing that selling it is the next step in your life to move forward takes away the sting.

By putting our belongings into a pod to declutter the house and painting over the 'growth chart' of our children's years and removing anything personal and turning our house into a 'Stepford House', it doesn't feel like our home anymore. Our new home is very exciting and we can't wait to move, and are making lots of project lists, plans and talk about the things we want to do there instead of the things we 'have' to do here to sell the place.

I lived in my former house for 15 years and put my heart and soul into making it exactly what I wanted. I said many, many times that I would have to be carried out and would never, ever be able to leave it. I knew I would be absolutely heartbroken to have to walk away from 15 years of plants that I nurtured and fussed over.

Then we decided to move, for several reasons.

Let me tell you- the stress of prepping that home for sale, de-personalizing everything we had designed for our own specific uses, and trying to sell it in a dead market just about did me in. I was ecstatic to walk away and never once looked back, nor did I shed even the first tear. I felt as if I had escaped to be honest.

Emotionally divorcing happened during the decluttering, POD loading, and staging with neutral objects. Most of the things I loved were in storage and my attachment to the gardens just sort of ... waned... in the face of all else I was having to deal with.

Once you make the decision to sell move forward and don't look back. It can be a huge and daunting task and you need all your focus just to get through it. Future projects are always more interesting than former projects anyway, and a new house is the most interesting project of all.

I will always love that garden and I have tons of photos and memories to reflect on when I feel the need. I know it is not being looked after properly (no one else could ever do it as well as me!) but I got good money out of the sale and it has enabled me to move on to the next phase of my life, so in that respect served me very well. Life is a journey, not a destination, and to have new things you must give up the old. It's the circle of life.... and I'm rambling terribly.

You'll do fine when it comes to leaving for the last time. The excitement over the new house over rules all else.

We have been in this house 15 years also - the longest I have lived in any one house since I was living at home with my parents (in that house 16 years).

We'll be selling next year even though we are purchsing our retirement home this week. I have already lost interest in this house and have switched to clean up, paint, de-clutter, move half of our furniture, get this one ready to sell, and "how can I get the most $$ for it".

Over the years since I left home I have lived in soooo many houses that even though I love this house, I love the new place more. Start thinking of the 'old' house as just $$$$ instead of your home. CM

Our current house has never felt like home, we always knew we would only be in Seattle 4-5 years, so while I really turned it into a charming family home, I have no attachment to it. I don't care if someone buys it and razes it to the ground-just buy it!!! My old townhome in VA was our first home and when I heard negative comments during the few showings I was around for, it stung! But overall I am not a sentimental gal, so leaving it behind was not all that hard.

Get divorced. ;-) I was in my last house 12 years including several years after the divorce. We had a "sell date" in the divorce agreement, so I always knew it was coming. I had also remarried and purchased a new home with my current husband before the "sell date" came due, so it was basically a matter of just getting rid of the old house. It was emptied, cosmetically repaired and repainted and sold within a week.

Probably not the advice you were looking for, but I truly was emotionally detached from that house.

I still miss my little house I sold in Michigan 3 years ago. But I separate that from the having to move on thing though I'm still trying to find a place that's similar which has been distracting.
For me the harder issue is money. I can't emotionally detach myself from the issue of losing money on a house which seems to happen to me a lot.

A few times, while selling our house last year, I would go outside and shut the front door, then stand at the sidewalk and look at the house as if for the first time.

I would really look at the landscaping, the lawn, the outside of the house, check out the roof, etc.

Then I'd go inside and see it as if for the first time - where is the coat closet? Is the entry way big enough? How about the kitchen being over there? Is there room for a table?

Are the windows big enough? Is there enough space for the furniture?

Are the bathrooms ok? How about the closets?

And so on. Doing this a couple of times helped me see the house as a product I wanted to sell, rather than as our home.

It was also very helpful in noticing that the furniture was too big for the room and should be sold or taken out, the fireplace needed a good cleaning, the outside door to the garage should be painted, etc. All the things that go unnoticed because we're used to them.

I still think about that house fondly, because it was a good neighborhood and served us well while we were there, but it's not our home anymore.

I was miserable for about a week after we decided to sell. I had never loved the house but I had gotten to the point where I had made my peace with it and was making the changes to make it more "mine", and it was pretty rough to have the rug yanked out from under me and have to face starting over again, plus there was other highly stressful stuff going on at the same time. But, my family is a lot more important to me than material goods, including a house. Like other posters, the intense stress of readying the house for sale, one financial outlay after another, the months of incredibly hard work, the "Stepfordizing" - I am SO over this house! I got very depressed several times during the months of work just because I felt like I was drowning in work on a house I didn't give a damn about, completely draining my physical and emotional resources, but it wasn't anything to do with leaving a beloved home. Heck, maybe if I had loved it and was passing on a house I cherished to someone else who would also love it, maybe I might have felt less burned-out. Now I feel like I'm camping in someone else's house, and I didn't even completely strip the house of any trace of personality the way some people do. Like jellyben, I don't care if someone takes a bulldozer to it once I'm out of here!

We can't even start seriously househunting until we have a contract on this one; contingencies on the sale of the buyer's home are rarely accepted these days (even with a kickout clause, since RE agents don't like to show houses with accepted offers it's tantamount to taking the house off the market) and we can't afford a bridge loan or two mortgages. So I don't really have any idea of what the future is going to hold for us, we're just in limbo.

Spend every Sunday for six months showing it at FSBO open houses before you hire an agent, delay putting in the new HVAC in the new home, the new windows in the new home, and the new doors in the new home, spend two springs weeding and mulching an old garden that will not be yours (if you ever get lucky!), and delay putting in garden beds in your new home. Pay eighteen extra house payments (that could have paid for the HVAC, windows or doors!) - that really convinces you!

I too, loved my little home. It was MINE - I bought it between marriages. I bought a cheap dump and fixed everything that it needed. We lived there 11 years - the longest time in one place in my adult life, too. We never intended to leave the house, either. I got a well-paying job, Dad moved in, and my knees "went", so we needed to move, and fast. We could afford it, so we took a chance.

When we were house-hunting, I was just so focused on the things that were wrong with the old house - laundry in basement, too many stairs to the back door to let the dogs out, one bathroom, not enough room in the living room. In my experience, you start paying more attention to the negatives than to the things you love. It is very like an unwanted divorce, in that respect.

I really miss my old townhouse neighborhood. It was active and people were plain friendly (or nosy, depends on how you look at it). I miss the wonderful kitchen we had. BUT I do not miss going up and down the stairs a gazillion times a day or the cramped little bedrooms for my children or the traffic noise.

It was hard to put the house on the market - we stalled for a good month or two before our agent sort of forced us. But we had already moved to our new house and there was no way we could carry two houses indefinitely. Once we moved forward, I just shifted my focus from "old wonderful home" to "commodity". It was something I had to sell. Now, what did we have to do to create a product that other people wanted?

I've moved so much in my lifetime that I've never really gotten emotionally attached to any one house. I bet I've lived in at least 50 different houses/apartments, and I'm in my mid-40s. The first house I bought as an adult will always have a special place in my heart, but I mostly miss it because it had wood floors! I don't miss the noisy street it was located on or the 20 barking dogs who lived on my block alone or the hilly backyard that was a pain in the behind to mow. The current house I live in is my husband's and, since he lived in it with his ex-wife, I have absolutely no attachment to it! In fact, it will be good riddance (!) when we move out of it next month. I can see myself getting attached to the new house we are in the process of buying. It'll be the biggest house I've ever lived in, and the first house my husband and I buy together.