…one of the best things you get as a “Christmas gift” is a literature organizer you pick up off Kijiji from an accounting office on your way home from work Christmas Eve at a fraction of what a new one would’ve cost!
Plus you get to be *really* excited about organizing all your various papers – regular paper! Scrap paper! Coloured paper! Hole-punched paper! Notepads! Construction paper!
If it looks like we have a lot of gifts under the tree, you have to remember that in the month of December, I basically wrap anything I would’ve bought anyhow – dish soap, shampoo, the empty box for the slippers I bought because I needed them in September – and use those things to fill out the tree so it looks more impressive than it actually is.
Usually the kids are so focused on what they’re getting (where we also use tricks like wrapping gifts that might normally go together in separate packages – a PJ set of tops and bottoms? Two gifts! A two-pack of storage containers for your room? Lucky you – two more gifts!), that they don’t notice that dad is getting a lot of toiletries (or they just interpret it as “They don’t get toys so now they get toothpaste?” adult weirdness they don’t understand.)
Anyhow, Merry Christmas from our house to yours!
“Lover” – Taylor Swift
Friday turned into an even more emotional housing-news related day then we expected.
In addition to being the possession day of our old house for the new owners, we heard that the condo complex where we lived for a couple years during our time in Calgary was engulfed in flames displacing numerous residents only a few days before Christmas including a couple who were our neighbours at the time and still lived in the same complex nearly twenty years later.
I’ve written before about the condo we bought when we lived in Calgary.
It was a pretty iconic building – right on the busy 14th St, just a few blocks up from the infamous “Red Mile”, our condo building had a peaked blue roof that made it visible from numerous places downtown and around the city with its unique design which made it quite memorable for anyone who went by.
So you can imagine the horror Shea and I felt when we saw the news on Twitter (while randomly scrolling, from of all people, W. Brett Wilson who posted that he saw a fire from wherever he was in Lower Mount Royal along with a pic and I remember thinking “that looks close to where our old condo was.” Then, when I did some further searching, realising that indeed our old blue-roofed castle was engulfed in flames!)
We immediately began scouring social media and turned to Calgary local networks for more info (including seeing that same former next-door neighbour I mentioned earlier as one of the people being interviewed in multiple media stories.)
Fortunately, it sounds like no humans were harmed but a few pets may not have made it.
It was already a day of mixed emotions but seeing this horrible news from Calgary put the sad feelings we had into perspective – yes, we were handing over the keys to what had been “our house” for fifteen years. But compared to the reasons someone could be leaving their home, our reason wasn’t really that sad.
And if we focused on the fact that not only are we now living in a nicer, newer home but that we also suspect we’ve sold to a young couple who are likely buying their own first home, possibly as new or recent Canadians, that makes it even more special and something to celebrate instead of be sad about.
Shea had a very long day and Pace is both pretty introverted and a stereotypical teenager so it’s hard to get him out of the house at the best of times. That meant Sasha and I had a daddy-daughter date to The Artesian’s “Holiday Sing-a-long” Thursday night which was great fun.
I’ve made reference in past posts to some of the upgrades and renovations we’ve done at our house over the past 15 years (and when I say “we”, I’m seriously indebted to Shea’s parents and my parents who helped many of these projects happen saving us *thousands* in labour costs if we’d had to hire contractors or making sure it was done a lot better than if we’d attempted some of these projects ourselves.)
I thought it might be fun to try to list them in no particular order…
Possession day for our old house is Friday so Shea and I spent a few hours tonight making sure we had completely cleared it out of all our stuff, did a final bit of cleaning, and having a few tears as we locked the door for the final time.
I’m usually pretty sentimental about stuff in general but I’ve been surprisingly unsentimental about this move.
I think a big part of that is this move feels right – the starter house we bought fifteen years ago served us well but it was also a house we bought before I ever went back to school and started earning the “medium librarian bucks”, before we had family, before our life circumstances had changed enough from a couple who were just starting to find our place in the world to a couple that feels fairly comfortable where we are.
There are so many fond memories in our old house of course – watching our kids grow up, completing so many home improvement projects over the years, birthdays and Christmases, standing at the window watching for a taxi to take us to the airport for holidays, BBQ’s and other parties with family and friends, Grey Cup watch parties, endless nights watching movies or hockey games in the basement on and on and on.
But also going into our empty house makes me realise how much of a starter house it was – the accumulated dings in the walls, that cupboard that never closed properly, that wine stain on the carpet even carpet cleaners couldn’t get out, the mismatched light switch, the tangle of unknown wires in the furnace room. Also on and on and on.
So yeah, I had a few tears when we locked that door for the final time. But I’m excited for the next phase of our life and also happy for the young couple who are buying our house and starting out on the same journey we’ve further ahead in following but traveling the same path.
The deal is done, the papers signed at the lawyer, the only thing left to do to complete the selling of our old home and finalize the transition to our new home is to hand over the keys on Friday (okay, the realtors do that.)
Anyhow, beyond the very obvious single answer that “There was a buyer looking for what we were offering at the same time we were selling”, there are a few things I think we did to help move our property so quickly.
Strangely, pricing below market value (which is what most people would expect for a house that sells in four days and which we did to sell our Calgary condo quickly) is something we *didn’t* do this time. We actually listed above market value as we saw a big gap in what the market had for houses in our price range with the features our house had (five bedrooms! Numerous upgrades! Great location!). We were prepared to sit on an empty house for a bit to get our price and in the end, we ended up getting slightly more than what other similar houses in the area were going for, even with selling in December.
So what are some of the things we did (or were encouraged to do by others) to make our house sell so quickly?
1. Maintained Our House
We saw some houses in the same price range that were, frankly, dumps, and very few that had as many upgrades as ours did. But you have to remember that until a couple months ago, we weren’t planning to move (in any serious way) so a lot of the things we had upgraded were things we chose to do to better our own home over the years – installing new windows, replacing the furnace, installing air conditioning, redoing the entire fence – with a rough objective of doing one major project per year. Right before we listed, we also tried to do some “touch-up” repairs – painting over the chipped paint behind the garbage can, updating some trim that had come off in the bathroom, a new coat of paint in one room that really needed it.
2. Took Professional Pictures
I remember asking our realtor if she took photos or hired someone. She said she normally just took her own photos but she’d recently had good luck using a professional photographer so I’m not sure if my question prompted her but she decided to do the same with ours. In the end, I think it made a world of difference to have a pro who knew how to stage rooms, photoshop out some blemishes (I wondered if that was ethical but I guess magazines do it all the time and really, any buyer would get to see the actual condition or where our daughter decided to draw in permanent marker on the carpet when they viewed the house!)
3. Took Pictures Before Moving Out Completely
On a related note, we made the timing work so that we were able to have much of the clutter gone and the house clean then the photos taken only a couple days before the movers arrived to clean out the house completely of all furniture and any other large items. This was great for a couple reasons – in the photos, the house looked clean and sleek but also lived in. Also, some furniture in the pictures helped hide ding marks from over the years (again, ethnically, I think you have to disclose anything that’s not visible but if a couch is covering up some chipped paint on the wall, that’s visible to anyone who cares to look). Also, research shows that houses that are photographed empty get much lower selling prices because, whether it’s true or not, an empty house conveys the message that you’re desperate to sell.
4. Were Flexible on Possession
Partly to reduce our own stress, we did not make the buying of our new home conditional on the selling of our old home. But that also meant we were prepared to sit on two mortgages for a month or two and possibly well into the spring since the market in Regina is already quite soft. In the end, not tying the buying and selling together meant we could move into our new house at a somewhat leisurely pace and then, by the time, we had it listed and started getting showings and offers, we were able to accommodate a buyer who wanted a very quick possession date instead of having to wait for our new house to be ready or whatever.
5. Decided To List Before Christmas
As I mentioned in a recent post, we seriously debated whether to even list before Christmas but our realtor earned her money more than in any other way by convincing us to list early (in fact, by the end of November very soon after we took possession of our new house) and that led to six showings and one solid offer within four days. (Of course, that makes me wonder if we could’ve listed our house for even more but again, not having to carry two mortgages with all associated costs plus the stress of looking after two houses was offset by any “discount” we gave on our selling price.)
Bonus: Wrote Our Own Blurb
Real estate listings are sort of like obituaries – they tend to follow a similar template and use similar language, always with a goal of painting the subject in the most positive light. When our realtor was getting close to listing our house, she said she would send it around to other agents in her office first and I offered to write a summary of our house to include. Although I used a similar format to what I saw in other real estate listings, I put a few unique touches in my write-up about the home’s history, the neighbours, a couple unique inclusions that others might not even list – all of which she ended up including in the blurb that got posted to MLS.
And now the deal is done and we can focus on building our new life in our new house!
