Moving on (Part 2) - Selling the House

In September my wife and I started working on our house in VA to sell. At this point in time we really did not know we were moving, but this is when the work started. It began with a trip to Home Depot (my favorite store) to buy ceramic tile and paint for the master bathroom, paint for 4 other rooms in the house, and crown molding for one of the bedrooms. Does not sound too bad, does it? Well, that was just the beginning. We painted basically every room in the house. Some rooms we painted twice because the first color just did not look right. After all this was done we decided to install hardwood floors. So we installed hardwood floors on the main level (kitchen, hall, foyer, formal living/dining, and half bath). I was going to install the hardwood myself, but we found a company to install them for us, and we could not beat the price. My wife and I removed all the old flooring before they installed the new floors. This was a huge job. We also installed new carpet in the family room. (What a pain moving all the furniture around.) Well, with all the new flooring on the main level it did not seem right to not install new flooring in the laundry room, so I installed ceramic tile in there. By now I have become pretty good a putting down ceramic tile. ;-) I installed new light fixtures throughout the house. Installing them was the easy part, picking them out took days.

Now the work moved to the outside. I replaced some of the railing on our porch where we found a little rot, and my wife painted the porch. We headed back to Home Depot, which by now they knew us by name, and bought some new plants for the yard. I also installed new light fixtures on the front and back of the house. We also had to replace the bottom section of our garage door. I will save that story for some other time. Keep in mind all the work did not happen over night. By now, it is first of November and I am tired of painting. Now it is time to move some things into storage. It is amazing how much "junk" you accumulate over the years. We donated a ton of stuff, tossed a lot in the trash, and put some in storage.

We finally put our house on the market, and 10 days later it was sold. Not bad considering how long some of the houses are staying on the market. So now what? We have sold our house, let go look for a new one. You will have to wait for that store in my next posting. :-)



If you want see more photos of the house click here.