Staging a house for a quick PCS Sale

Have you wondered how to stage your house so you can sell it quickly when you have to PCS on short notice? I am here to show you how I did it and received a full price offer within 48 hours of listing.

We had been slowly working on remodeling the house over the last few years but when we got Scott's training date for OTS about 3 weeks before he had to leave things really got bumped up! I had fractured the bones in my toes in lots of crazy places and was just really getting mobile by the time he left for training and I had to get a lot of the painting and things done without him around. Then we found out that we were moving overseas and Scott was supposed to report to Germany just 5 days after graduation without even coming home! (Things didn't go exactly like that, but that's a story for another post!)  It made for a crazy summer! BUT, we were able to get it all done with a lot of help from neighbors and our family who lived a few hours away and made lots of trips down to help us.

We rented a storage unit for some of the big things and de-cluttered like crazy before putting the house on the market. We took down almost all personal decoration on the walls and replaced them with generic decorations so that anyone would be able to picture the house as theirs. I know for me I have a hard time looking at someone's house and picturing it as mine when pictures of the family are looking down at me from every wall!

I stalked Tai Pan Trading, Hobby Lobby, Walmart and a few other local home decor places and bought almost everything on clearance. Most of the pictures for the walls I was able to get for less than $10 a piece, some for just $1. Do I love all of them with all my heart? Not necessarily but they are fairly generic and made the house look finished and decorated without distracting from the house itself. The one thing I splurged on was the large mirror in the living room over the fireplace since the fireplace was the big focal point in the room and the mirror needed to be a specific shape and color to tie in in with the sconces above the fireplace.

When painting I chose very generic colors, sands and dark creams that wouldn't turn off a potential buyer and I used the same color in multiple rooms so that things would flow nicely. I left all the extra paint in the basement for the new owners.

When I was choosing a realtor I interviewed several on the phone. I ended up choosing our realtor because I got a good vibe from him, he worked locally, had great recommendations from people I know, he wasn't intimidated by needing to sell in 5 weeks and he used a professional photographer. The photographer part was really important to me since I didn't want cell phone pictures used in our listing!

This is what our lovely historic home looked like after I stripped wallpaper for weeks and painted like there was no tomorrow (cause there really wasn't, we had a deadline). Borrowing a carpet cleaner from our neighbor and doing all the carpets myself saved us a ton of money and made a world of difference with our old carpets.

The view from the street

The Backyard/garage
(it's hard to see but there are 3 fruit trees growing back there). I bought a zillion mums to plant in the backyard and in the pots on the front porch. Flowers are an easy way to fill in empty areas, add color and interest to your yard and make it look finished.

The Entry Way 

Notice the very generic picture over the chair? Cost me only $7, it's huge and it tied in all the living room colors from the other side of the room.

 Living Room
We kept the mantle very simple and used the rule of odd numbers to be visually appealing.

Master Bedroom, just off of the living room
This room had the weirdest carpet (not quite as weird as it looks in the photo though!) and wallpaper but replacing carpet wasn't in the budget nor did we have the time. And there was no time to paint this room. So, we replaced the bedding with a solid color that appeals to a wide range of people and made that the focus along with a few black and white prints of Venice to tie in to the black and cream pillows on the bed.  The framed prints of Venice came from Tai Pan Trading at $3.50 each. There is another one on the wall to the right of the camera.

 The Girl's Room 
I do wish the photographer had let me move the items from under the bed before the photos but he was a speedy photographer! This is the same creamy sand paint from the living room with simple white curtains and solid colored bedding. There are cute, generic girls room pictures on the two walls that you cant see.

Bathroom 

We had already finished the bathroom a few months before all of this craziness, thank goodness. When we bought it the bathroom had the original pink tile and floral wallpaper and the tiniest bathtub. This was the biggest project as it had to be gutted and totally redone. All of the finishings are very neutral. This is the only bathroom so we had to make it look good.

The Kitchen

This was the other room that we didn't do as much to. I did paint all the trim and doors white since they were a strange almond color and very dingy looking. Did you know they sell wallpaper glue in little tubes so you can reseal wallpaper that is beginning to peel along the seams? Pretty cheap and it makes a huge difference. We cleaned and sealed the wallpaper, painted the trim and doors and just made sure everything else was squeaky clean and uncluttered.

Downstairs Bedroom 

We always used it as a playroom but staged it as a bedroom for the listing. Aside from the solid colored bedding and the pictures on the walls everything else we already owned and just re-purposed.

Downstairs Storage Area 

The basement is only half finished and this is the unfinished storage area. The laundry area is in the other half of the open space in the basement but wasn't really photo worthy. All the shelves are the same type and we tried to just made everything look neat and organized.

 No pictures were taken of the other massive bedroom in the basement. It was the final project that I finished the night before the house went on the market. It is twice the size of the other downstairs bedroom and we used it as a craft room/office. There is also a very large pantry in the basement that didn't get pictured along with an under the stairs storage area where Scott kept his tools. Not every room has to be pictured in the listing. It can create a desire to go see the house and see what else there is that wasn't in the pictures.


With a tight deadline we had to be selective about what things we were able to get done. I couldn't get it all done so I picked the things that I thought would have the biggest impact and made those my priority.  For example: I really wanted to take down the wallpaper in the kitchen but then I discovered that the ceiling had white wallpaper on it (who wallpapers the ceiling!?!?) that overlapped the wallpaper on the walls and I knew that was just too big of a project for our time frame. Would I have loved to have the whole house perfect? Yes, but if just wasn't possible with our time frame.

It was a super crazy process but getting that full priced offer within 48 hours made all the sleepless nights, paint splattered clothes, trips to the storage unit and fast food worth it.

Basement Bedroom Transformation

Over the next MANY months I will post updates as I get my house and family ready for our first PCS after my husband graduates from OTS next year. You might ask, why am I starting now when I have so much time between now and then? Well, when you have two kids who follow you from room to room when you try to get things done and undo the things you have just done, the things that you think will take an hour take a day(at least), the things that should take a day, take a week, etc....

In addition to de-cluttering, getting rid of things, getting organized, and packing the things that I don't want the movers to pack, I will be getting our house ready to sell and it will be mostly me since my hubby is busy with school and work. Our house was built in the 1920's so it needs quite a bit of updating before we sell it. There will be a LOT of wallpaper stripping, wall patching (our walls are plaster) and then painting. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, let me tell you, our kitchen has white wallpaper ON THE CEILING! Who puts wallpaper on the ceiling...?

We put made progress on the bathroom last night and I'll fill you in the details later but for now, here are some pictures of the basement bedroom we worked on last summer.

We did:

• sealant around the windows, 
• nasty carpet removed (found laminate tiles underneath the carpet pad that we will do more with later),
• new paint for the whole room, including the ceiling and windows
• We used Beige Buckthorn on the walls and white on the ceiling and around the windows
• Rug that my in-laws gave us

What started out as this:

Morphed into this:

(I love that in the middle pic you can see the bizarre green and some other strange color that were in the room when we bought the house, book-ended by the new beige wall paint and white ceiling paint)

And ended up as this:

Eventually I will either make or buy new, fun curtains for this room and put pictures on the wall.

Thing Two loves having this as her playroom. That being said, I'm hoping that if our next house has space for a play room it will be on the same floor as the main living areas. 

The other downstairs bedroom will be one of my next projects. Right now the walls and ceiling are throw-up inducing yellow. I use it as a craft room/exercise space. It's almost twice the size of the playroom. What color do you think I should paint it?

Moving With The Military

Recently a friend asked me how I felt about entering the Air Force and dealing with moving on a regular basis, especially with kids. This is something that I have thought a lot about and was one of the things that I had to reconcile in my mind before we decided on this new course for our life.

Something you may not know about me is that I moved quite a bit growing up and people always asked me if we were military and the answer is no. My dad has so many interests and things he wants to do in life that the next big opportunity was always somewhere else and so we moved frequently, chasing the dream. Making friends who had lived in one house their whole lives was always a bit surprising and seemed like the ideal to me when I was growing up and I envied them. I moved 11 times before I left for college, (lived in the same house twice) and lived in 5 states. Interestingly enough, I ended up marrying someone who had only lived in 3 houses before he left for college and two of those were in the same city. As I've grown older I've realized that moving a lot while growing up meant I was challenged and grew in many ways that my friends did not and I had opportunities that some of them never would have had. That being said, there were some pretty tough things about moving frequently and sometimes rather suddenly and unexpectedly as a kid.

The big moves growing up, my 5 mission moves and our 3 moves in one city since we've been married.

So, with all that being said, how am I okay with the Military lifestyle for my kids, you might ask?

 (get comfy as this might be a long post...)

Timeline questions for recruiter

Yesterday Scott met with his Recruiter to sign some paperwork and so I jumped at the chance to slip a few of the million questions I have into the meeting. I narrowed it down to 3 questions and Scott agreed to ask the Recruiter about them.

Question #1: what are the guidelines for having a blog about the Military? I would hate to do something that would jeopardize Scott's position or military operations in any way or anything else.
Answer: Having a blog is fine as long as you are very mindful of what to post and are careful about you say. You never know who will be reading your blog. Basically, if you are questioning if you should say something, then DON"T. I also found this guideline online: OPSEC rules

Questions #2: at what point during training will we know where and when our first PCS (Permanent Change of Station) will be?
Answer: The recruiter actually wasn't sure what the answer to this was. He is an enlisted airman and so when he went through training it was slightly different than it will be for an officer. But, never fear I will find that out one of these days and share what I learn. I just downloaded this guide which seems EXTREMELY extensive and I hope it can answer more questions about PCS.

Question#3:  If we sell our house, put our things in storage and I take my girls and go live with family either before or while Scott is gone for training will they still pay to move us to our first base? (I had heard that they will only move you from the address that is on the application for the Air Force).
Answer: If the things are in storage in the same town that we applied from then it shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately I will have done all the work of packing up the house and moving everything into a storage unit. But, I won't have a load it onto a truck for a long haul, they will do that and unload it and move us in when it gets there.

One things that the recruiter did tell my hubby was that once they have moved you into your new housing and unpacked you, you need to remind them to come back the next day and pick up all the empty boxes and packing materials for you.

Overall, I've been impressed with the recruiters willingness and ability to answer my questions however trivial they may seem!