We are seeing For Sale signs popping up in front of houses around our neighborhood and we are at the 2 year countdown point for putting one up on ours. That assumes my husband retires at the end of May 2017 when in fact he may pick a later date in the year.
Regardless we are spending more time talking about the logistics of preparing for and accomplishing a cross country move.
A neighbor loaded stuff into a PODs container before putting their house up for sale. Should we consider that mode of moving our belongings vs. a rental truck vs. regular movers? Has anyone had experience with PODs for moving?
Who is likely to buy our house - someone who will live in it as is and slowly improve it, someone who will do a major renovation and/or addition before moving in, or a developer who will raze it and build a gigantic house on our big flat lot which is unusual in this part of town?
Could we do a For Sale by Owner? Not my preference but we are going to talk about it at least.
What should we repair or redecorate in the next two years based on how best to market our house for the least investment? We definitely are not going to remodel the baths of kitchen. We probably will have the exterior trim painted and some of the interior. We are fixing soon the retaining wall and stairs down the hill into our wooded area. It looks like we have found a reasonable approach and contractor for that. At the same time we will replace some dying but highly visible bushes so they have time to fill in.
How much of our stuff are we taking with us and how do we go about sorting and de-acquisitioning the rest? How far in advance do we need to start seriously doing this?
How do you transport a dog across the country without it getting lose or having a terrible trip?
Where will we live in California? What are the "must haves" for each of us? What can we afford? Will we want to rent the first year?
As you can imagine there is a lot to discuss and decide! Any resources or experiences that you can share would be most helpful.
Moving is really tough. I have been trying to sell my home for 5 years. Each year I have given away more stuff. When I move, I will have to sell or give away even more, since I'm moving from a house to an apartment. The documents are difficult. I've just sorted 5 boxes (of my 25), and found that I really didn't need to save all of it, but at the time I thought those pieces of paper were really important. I'm looking for a shredding service to take the discards, since most of them have credit card numbers, account numbers, and other identity info. Good luck! My advice is take it slow, but set a goal for each day (or week) of getting rid of something.
ReplyDeleteI hope your house sells this season so you can move on with your plans. Have you considered scanning the documents you need to keep and putting them into Dropbox or some other cloud based storage? I am going to do that with everything we don't have to produce regularly. Wouldn't dispose of birth certificates, etc. but old tax documents and so on could become electronic.
DeleteIf you paint anything go to the paint store and ask what the most popular Neutral color is. Currently it is grey. That is now the color of most of our rooms.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't have a passport- get one. Getting a new driver's license without one is a major pain (you can no longer just turn in your old one in a new state).
We went ahead and bought our house in Delaware before selling our house here. I would be tempted to sell your house even before he retires. Once the interest rates go up I think housing will tank! That means they will be less expensive to you if you can come in with cash. We are aggressively marketing our house-- we live in the country and need for it to go to a good owner- soon. We are planning on taking a loss (we bought at the top - 2005.
We are sedating our dogs. We are only doing half the country....
That is what we have learned :) AGGGG! Hold on- it is a wild ride!