Tuesday, November 22, 2011

On the market! Good news, Bad news, and Pictures


Our house is now listed with the MLS although I'm not sure why anyone in Major League Soccer will be interested. 

The good news is that all the hard work is done.  I might even get back to blogging or writing or photography more!  Yea!  Good news!

The bad news is that our house is no longer a home and has become, instead, a showplace.  We need to vacuum more often, shampoo carpets more often, and  put things away more often.  And when anyone wants to come look at it, we need to run around like maniacs to make sure everything looks good -- optimizing it's marketability.  Then, if possible, vacate the premises and go find some way of wasting one to two hours. 

And poor Daisy has to go into a large dog carrying kennel because it is poor marketing to have her barking, "Go away!  Go away!"   But when I do have to put her in the kennel, I give her an obnoxious number of Doggie Treats.

The other good news is that if we can sell it, we can move closer to Karen's work and closer to the grandchildren -- although they spend lots of time here already.  But it will cut down their commute as well.

The other bad news is that as long as it does not sell (estimated time-to-sale time in the current market is 8-12 months, although we've priced it to move quicker.  Since, to make it look more open and appealing, we have removed tons of furniture into storage.  So, for instance, I no longer have a bedtable so when I go to sleep, I put my glasses on the floor where I can step on them in the morning.

Anyhow, the realtor needed pictures for the listing and his pictures, well, were awful.  So I took a batch of shots -- several of them panoramas that I stitched together with Photoshop because even my wide angle lens is not wide enough to show the whole bathroom in one picture.


Furthermore, it doesn't show the time I spent scraping out old caulking and putting in new caulking. 

BAGMAN (Suddenly appearing in my blog for a moment, jumping up and down and yelling): "Mark was using his caulk!  Mark was using his caulk!"

I hit him over the head with my caulk gun and shove him back out the door.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  I was also going to mention that we always shower and have seldom taken advantage of the whirlpool tub so we gave it to our cats and put the litter box in it.  But that didn't seem appealing from a marketing point of view so we moved it to an upstairs bathroom floor hidden under the sink.  The cats have not seemed to mind and adjusted well.

Okay, I'll continue posting pictures of the house because...well, I don't really know why.  I guess I post them because they exist.  One of those existential questions.  Why do we post anything?   It's not as if everyone in the World of Blog wants to see pictures of my bathroom.  I just hope some prospective buyers see pictures of our rooms on the MLS and want to live in them. 

So -  Here is the house itself.

Looks like a postcard

And here is the...


...well, it is kind of the foyer to the left and the formal dining room in the middle (the dining room that we use on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  (This photo straightened up pretty well with Photoshops Lens Correction tool -- unlike the bathroom).

Then turning around, we have part of the formal livingroom on the right (another unused room except for Christmas). 


...plus a view into the kitchen which we use all the time and the stairs that go up to my office. (I did not shoot the office because even though I straightened it up and moved the computer against the wall (where I hate it), it still just looks like a little square room.  And the MLS doesn't let you display everything!

Here is another view of the livingroom:


I took this shortly after the kids and grandkids moved in a few years ago.  After consideration, we decided it was a little too cluttered to show prospective buyers.  The difference between a home and a showplace.
And moving along, we have...


...a view of the den (or family room) as seen through the kitchen.   This is actually one of the few areas in the house we actually use on a regular basis.   I'm not quite sure why the lighting seems weird.  I must have tinkered with the temperature.   The refrigerator on the left really illustrates the difference between a house that is being "shown" and a regular home.  It's all gleamy and white.  When this was a home, it looked like this:


Now we come to the master bedroom, which I think is a a thoroughly prehistoric and sexist term for a bedroom.  Although the alternative of "mistress bedroom" has it's own negative connotations. 


Photographer's Confession:  Trying to combine four photographs into one panorama in Photoshop really frustrated me on this one.  They just didn't want to blend correctly.  I think the Photoshop term is "stitch."  (i.e., it dropped some stitches).   I tried to correct places where it didn't match over and over again, mostly using the clone tool.   Finally, I just uttered some choice words and decided that the realtor wouldn't notice at this size.   But when I blow a section of it up...


It's easy to see that this photo has been doctored to death.  But, believe it or not, it is a lot better than when it came out of the Photoshop Panorama Automated Gadget.   None of the lines connected at all. 

And finlly we have the guest room.


By this time I wasn't even worrying that horizon line wasn't horizontal.  And, no, we don't really have curved ceilings.

So if you know anyone who is moving to Charleston...

Meanwhile, I'll go and vacuum the floors again and try to get up tomorrow without stepping on my glasses. 











9 comments:

  1. Impressive grand tour, and yet this is what makes me most curious: Is that a knight's armour I see in the den?! (The saying "my home is my castle" pops to mind...)

    Good luck to you, I hope you won't have to live in a showroom for too long!

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  2. I'm glad Bagman had his chance to say something Baggish. ;-) Home selling is Hell, though, I pity you the next few months. It's a beautiful home though--hopefully it won't be long.

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  3. Nice, I will spread the word to a few of my writer friends on facebook, they live there and may know someone who is in the market!

    Beautiful house, compared to my dinky condo...of course I may have to sleep in the new Lexus LOL

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  4. Good luck on the sale, Mark. I related to every word. I sincerely hope we will never have to move again.

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  5. I wish I were moving to Charleston - & that I had any money at all. Your house is gorgeous! We house-sat for some friends who were moving from Cincinnati to Richmond - their house was taking forever to sell & they needed to go ahead & move. We stayed about 3-4 days a week so it would looked lived in (for the burglars), but then we had to leave it in pristine condition when we left for work each day (for the "customers"). It was a delicate balance & involved a LOT of vacuuming. To this day I only vacuum our house once every six weeks.

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  6. You should have no trouble selling your house. The only reason ours is not on the market yet, is I dread the thought of clearing all my clutter when someone tromps through. Guess I need to get to work. Maybe after the holiday. BTW, have a Happy Thanksgiving.

    Hope your new house has room for Bagman. Butler, too. Perhaps separate rooms.

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  7. Oh Mark the house looks great. You have indeed done a lot of work. Hope it sells quickly for you. I remember living in a "staged house" before we bought this one. I could pretend we were going to sell and maybe I could get mine all spruced up.
    QMM

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  8. Your house looks fabulous, Mark! And, at least for my taste, there are still enough personal objects such as photographs and knick-knacks around to make it feel homely... Did they really insist you couldn't have a bedside table? I certainly wouldn't want to put my specs, my book and the reading lamp on the floor!
    You can imagine I almost fainted when I saw the picture of the living room with all the... things... :-)

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