Putting House up for Sale, now what ???
tim smith
4 years ago
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thinkdesignlive
4 years agothinkdesignlive
4 years agoRelated Discussions
Marlene with another 'House up for Sale' situation...
Comments (10)We had a robin nest in our plum tree once. The tree sat right next to several flower beds and the veggie garden, but though we'd be there working on them the mother didn't care. She just watched us as she sat on her eggs. When the babies hatched, then it got fun. They didn't attack us, but if we were near the tree (the nest wasn't that high up), we'd see them sitting on a fence or power line with a big worm in their beaks, waiting until we got the hint and moved away from the tree. Then they'd come feed the babies and fly off again. This went on until the babies were old enough to leave the nest -- go work on the garden, hear a robin chirp, look up, see mama or papa waiting with a worm, walk away from tree, watch them feed, go back to work on the garden. I guess we respected each other enough! I do hope you don't have to remove the nest. Maybe you could edge it over towards the other side of the porch and, I don't know, place a few pots of plants where it used to be to shield the view? She might be less huffy then, if she is inclined to be. Our respect for our plum tree robins paid off though... we got to stand there and watch the babies leave the nest. We felt like proud parents ourselves!...See MoreHouse up for sale - and no one's biting...
Comments (11)You may be getting to a point where people aren't coming to look at your place because it's been on the market for too many days. I know when we've been looking, our first thought on seeing a high days-on-market figure has been, what is wrong with that house? and then often as not we passed it over without going to look at it. ...I'm not saying anything is wrong with your house specifically, just that people turn down houses with high DOMs. If you haven't got a contract by mid-June, if you can, you might want to take it off the market for a bit, at least til fall when it'll pick up again. Summer is the absolute worst time to try to sell a house. We are putting our house up on the market next January (I totally get the conflicted feelings about gardening when you know you're going to leave it all behind!) I agree completely that curb appeal is everything. I bought my first house despite its truly ghastly condition because I irrationally fell in love with a magnificent garden. So definitely get out there and attack those dandelions! It is totally a heart-wrenching drag to invest time and money in a yard you know you're leaving, but financially, it's worth it: http://www.asla.org/nonmembers/publicrelations/homeowners_guide.htm Presumably you've already invested a lot of what you're going to from your previous years of gardening - but this is the BEST time to fill in the holes and tidy up. If you do want to keep it on the market, here's ALL the advice about landscaping that our realtor and his landscape designer friend suggested to us, emphatically, and over a good deal of beer: - Gardens in general really do help sell the house - but only if they're in good condition. Unkempt yards and ESPECIALLY weeds make people think that the house has been poorly kept up, too. (We do all organic, and our realtor has been BEGGING us to ChemLawn the place or something so the lawn looks all nice.) Prospective buyers routinely do a drive-by to look at the outside of houses before even scheduling an appointment. When I was looking - LOL I'm not proud - if I could, I went down the alley and peeked over the back fence too. If your yard looks ratty they may never come to look inside. - Both our realtor and a landscaper friend said that most people just cannot for the life of them envision a garden from drawings or a list of plants. (I don't understand that personally, but I have the perfect example of this in the blank stares of my husband when I moon over plant catalogs, LOL.) Most folks need to SEE it in its full glory to understand just how great your garden is. It's not enough to know there are some perennials back there someplace that you haven't gotten around to tending to. - In keeping with that, they both urged us to take photos of the garden at its peak throughout the season - all the way from crocuses in the snow to the last of the fall Misicanthus plumes. Then when you have showings or open houses, you can have large printouts of your pics in a little binder for people to flip through. My realtor has done this trick before and had fantastic results - it's the gardening equivalent of making cookies in the oven before open houses. For one thing, it allows prospective buyers to see your hydrangeas or iris or whatever in full glory even though they're just dead sticks at the time of the open house. Possibly more importantly, it keeps them hanging around in the house for longer while they look. The more time they spend in the house, the more likely they are to buy. ...If you're missing photos you wish you'd gotten earlier, you can always go online and find close-up pics of plants you have, and supplement with those. But it sounds like if you can muster it, you've got perfect timing to make your garden kick a** all summer. (LOL hopefully it won't be all summer!) - Write a little mini-guide in *excruciating* detail (but not in a way that makes it sound hard or scary)of what's in your garden, how easy it is to take care of, and any other tips you can think of. Your realtor should be able to put that on a web page or you should be able to make it into a brochure with pictures of your house and garden. ...People really seem to like this and it reassures them that they won't kill everything anyway. - Is your garden mentioned prominently in your ad? And are you putting descriptive enough ads out there? We just rented our apartment unit, and we'd had absolutely NO luck until I added a huge description of exactly what our garden was. We went from no calls to almost 100 in a week. ...Our realtor really liked the detail we could provide, because he said that even if a non-gardener bought the house, it reflected on the general standard of care we had for the whole property and made it seem again like a carefully managed place. - Do you have any online presence for your listing? That's another place some well-done garden pics can really make a place look great. If your realtor is affiliated with a large franchise then you should be able to get this and it's worth it. - I don't know where in Michigan you are, but think about advertising heavily on Craigslist. It's free and it really worked great for us, and it's spreading fast across the country. ...It can't hurt. - If you can get it together, you may want to have your realtor do some kind of "garden walk" event/open house for you to draw people in. - Another thing that you might want to consider is actually investing a little bit MORE in your garden by putting in stuff that's specifically geared to sell a place: plants and shrubs with year-round interest, and/or that are drought/neglect tolerant. This idea was presented to me as a kind of balance thing - on the one hand, most people won't know how to garden as much as you do, so a connoiseur's garden might be daunting, but on the other hand, you don't want to have McLandscaping as that turns a lot of people off. (There are enough Stella D'Oro daylilies in this world, thank you very much.) You want demonstrably carefree plants that escape total banality but also provide multi-season interest. Cranberry viburnum, hardy plumed grasses, some of the less common colors of evergreen barberries, red twig or yellow twig dogwood, Harry Lauder's Walking Stick, coneflowers, variegated shrubs like Daphne Carol Mackie, a Japanese maple that is relatively not so much of a PITA, etc. are all great. (My personal faves for this purpose are rugosa roses. Just try killing one. It's impossible! plus, they rebloom all summer, are fragrant, the foliage is nice and bushy and not modern rose-like at all, they turn brilliant purple or scarlet in fall, and they have bright orange or red hips that stick around through fall and right to the end of winter. You can't beat that!) - Think too about things that put on a tremendous show and then don't ask for anything for the rest of the year. There's an 80 year old peony bush in my backyard that would uncomplainingly pump out 100+ huge showy fragrant blooms a year, whether I fed and watered it or not. Tough hardy rambler roses, less ubiquitous daylilies (like Black-eyed Stella or Strawberry Candy), drifts of naturalizing daffodils, and crabapples are great for the same reason. - Paradoxically, while I would have thought that the ONLY place to spend money was on perennials, my realtor insisted that we fill in every single remaining gap with colorful annuals. The point was to make the house look as bright and cheery as possible because people would respond emotionally to that instead of saying, Hey, those are marigolds, I'd have to plant those again next year. - This last bit may be specific only to city folk because it's such a novelty here in Chicago - but think about planting a fruit tree. When people here found out that there was an apple tree in the back yard, and that it did in fact actually make real apples, they flipped. It just charmed their socks off. Our realtor thought the tree added a surprisingly large amount to the value of our house. If you don't have room for a dwarf tree, consider putting in something even like ultra-dwarf blueberries, a strawberry bed or a few raspberry canes, or even a little potted herb garden. People get inordinately excited by the idea of having their own little herb garden - it could cost you less than $50, look nice, and help charm potential buyers. ...Okay. That is just WAY more suggestions than I suspect anyone could possibly want, so now I'll stop rambling. But not before telling you my current plan to not be heartbroken all the time about leaving my garden: When I have to buy perennials to round out what's there so it looks good for when we put it up on the market, I'm choosing vigorous stuff so I can divide tons of it and keep it when I go; I'm asking some friends to give "foster homes" to a few really choice plants; I'm taking cuttings of absolutely everything I can and nursing them (in multiples) now; and I'm splurging and potting up plants I can take with me so I don't feel like I'm just stuck gardening for somebody else this year. It's making me feel good about tending this garden I love and feel rather unmotivated about, and helping me look forward to wherever it is I'm going. :) I do hope some of this is slightly helpful SOMEHOW! ...I do commiserate deeply. It's so awful to leave a house and a garden, and the process of selling is so awful... to have to do them both is just unimaginably crazy! let us know how it's going! (and just think of all the new plants you can buy when you sell, LOL)...See Moreput house on the market now, or wait until next spring?
Comments (17)We are actually renting our NC home out in order to move to FL for the kids to start the school year. The people who are renting it are a professional couple who can't sell their home in Massachusetts. We spent Feb-May on the market and it was a PIA. We did receive a couple of low-ball offers, but honestly I wish we had just done the rent thing from the get-go. As sketchy as the real estate market is right now, the rental market is hot. We had 5 good credit applications the first day that we offered it for lease. Another friend in the neighborhood who is moving to CA has done the same thing (and both of us have houses valued in the $700s). The class of renters is really different now-a-days. They are people like us ~ nice families with money to spend up front, who just have houses to sell in other cities that just aren't moving. It was so nice to not have to worry about the appraisal coming in right, the financing coming through, etc. etc. Frankly, we aren't in a hurry to buy in FL (want to get used to the area first and to see where we really want to settle once we live there.) We found a lovely home to rent in FL. It is peace of mind to know that in a "worst case scenario", I can always go back to the home I own in NC. I just think this is becoming more and more of the norm now-a-days. When I started researching renting, I was shocked to find out 29 houses in my neighborhood were being leased. I would NEVER have been able to pick out "the leased ones." Good luck and know whatever you decide from your gut, is the right decision for you!!...See MoreWhat color shutters for orangy brick house that will go up for sale?
Comments (6)Keep the shutters to one color. Black with a hint of brown might be nice. Then paint the downspouts and gutter that same color. Ben Moore shades of black: Link The shutters on the upper windows are too large. If you imagine the purpose of shutters, which is to close over the windows, you can see that they need to be a couple inches shorter. Can you find some way to clean the white streaking on the brick? I would not paint the front door black. The front door should stand out and be welcoming. It looks like you have a beautiful solid wood door. Would it be possible to sand and stain it? If you feel you must paint it, I would lean towards a color that goes with the orange-y brick. Green? Maybe a red that leans towards orange (rather than a blue-ish red)? You could improve the curb appeal by removing those large bushes and replacing with some nice foundation plantings. With curb appeal, it is all about the details, such as a nice light fixture next to the door, pretty chair on the porch, removing the Christmas lights . . . For more ideas, try posting this on the Home Decorating forum....See Moregreg_2015
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