My ideas for selling a house

I just had some thoughts recently about what to do for when a person is selling a house. Of course this was brought on by a friend’s need for prayers as she found the perfect house and needs hers to sell ASAP as the sellers will not allow contingencies on the sale (who DOES that?!). Now, these are just my opinions of course, most people could take it or leave it, but it’s a good idea to figure out what you can and shouldn’t do to help sell your house.

- do not bake or put some unusual smell into the air (cinammon, vanilla, etc) for potential buyers (PB). Even if you super-love the scent it may actually be a deterrent if they are allergic or don’t like it.

- A fresh coat of paint in the first rooms you enter is a great idea, especially if they are vibrant but clean colours (think taupe, super-light yellow, white, etc). Make sure proper ventilation is used as nothing is nastier than the smell of paint (well, cat pee is a huge contender too).

- De-clutter is a must. If you are just in the thoughts of selling your house and are not sure if it’ll happen, de-clutter your clutteriest area (yeah that’s not a word) like tool room, craft area, kids playroom, etc. There is a great way to do this if you just want to completely clear it out and have a clean area rather than just neatening it. Most would suggest either buying those expensive plastic containers, but who wants those all over, some would suggest boxes, but boxes look yucky. I would suggest a kind of ‘hiding’ it. Take every suitcase you have in your house that you won’t be using (who uses that giant sized one anyway ), especially those little carry-ons that no one uses. You could even borrow some from a friend for a while if you have a place to put them. Anyway, you can use plastic grocery bags to separate out smaller items and then put them all in the suitcase somewhat neatly, but tightly. That way you are not introducing yet another item into the house that needs to find a home as the suitcases should already have one and no one will know the difference. Bolts of fabric fits wonderfully into a larger suitcase and the clutter will be gone, creating a great, clean, decluttered area for PBs.

- Kitchen decluttering of counter tops. This is one of the harder ones because the kitchen is so used. It often has kettles, coffee pots, canisters, and other stuff on the counter. But, nothing says ‘don’t buy me, I’m not big enough’ to a PB is if the kitchen counter tops cannot be completely seen due to items on top. If you are in a house that doesn’t have the room for the items then why do you have those items?! *snort* Seriously though, find a neat place to put it. I say neat because when I was buying a house I looked at cupboards and *inside* them too. So if you think you can do a stash in the cupboards or even in the stove (hello Flylady!LOL) think again as a buyer is very likely to look deeper like this if they like the house.

- Cleaning. I know this is an obvious one, but it’s often missed. I don’t just mean makes sure the floor is clean, but I’m talking, stove tops (& inserts!!), cobwebs, dust, dryer lint, porch, and bathrooms. If there is noticable dirt/dust/grime, it can really turn people off and they tend to think if the cleaning was missed, what else was missed, kwim?

- Yardwork is important, but it is absolutely unnecessary to have it professionally done. Clean, neat and slightly groomed is enough to lure any PBs. Yes, I get curb appeal, but when people go all out and have some fancy flower beds put in, it can get overwhelming rather than appealing to the PB.

- If you have a bill-paying area as I do, it’ll be a total disaster. Paper clutter, calendars, etc laying about is not only potential PB deterrant but a personal security issue as well.

- This seems a little seedy, but is necessary for an easier sell. If you live in an area that has a certain time of day that would be a fast sale deterrant then do not schedule a showing for that time, under any circumstances. For instance, if you live on a street with a school, the idea of a school is fantastic and adds to the house, right? Well, do not schedule a showing for when school just starts or is just let out as the PBs will see how it’s not so peachy keen living on a school street with dozens of soccer moms’ crazy driving.

- My last point is more on the shopping side of things. I am really starting to get into not buying things for my house that #1. I don’t completely love and, #2. Have an actual place for, and I don’t mean a place under another thing. Seriously, if you don’t have a specific spot for it that will look uncluttered then don’t buy it.

I’m hoping these tips will help anyone sell their house.

I don’t know what to write

I am completely wasting time today.  I should be cleaning house, doing laundry and preparing for a very busy weekend but here I sit.  Why?  Because I have an o/l friend in labour and I can’t peel my eyes or fingers away from this keyboard & monitor.  Well, that and I hate loathe dislike cleaning, hmmm…. well you get the picture, cleaning is not my thing.

This weekend is going to be crazy busy.  I have my il’s coming tonight to spend the weekend as it’s Punk’s first communion.  A very special weekend.  But what makes it crazy is we also have the diaconate (or Deacon courses for those not in the know of that term).  There’s only 2 left before ordination so we can’t, nor don’t want to, miss any.  2, that’s it, a mere 2 until he’s ordained a deacon.  It’s unreal how short the time seems although I know it was a long haul, kwim?

I’m not really liking the changes to the pages to create a post here at WordPress.  I can’t seem to find anything easily and it has all this crap I don’t want to see like ‘tags’ and the so called ‘advanced options’.  Plus it doesn’t list all my categories at the same time every time I come back.  I hate changes like this.  It’s like Microsoft and their stupid so called Operating systems.  They change them so much over the years that I loathe to see what comes up next.  I’d love to be able to switch completely from Microsoft for everything, but the problem being that everyone else I communicate with over the internet is a MS user, and it messes things up.  Even having Mozilla Firefox for a web browser can be troublesome for some websites as they are often designed to accomodate MS browser crap.

Man, I think I’m cranky today.

I should be ecstatic

God, I hope that’s the way it is spelled.

I should be super happy.  Just yesterday I posted that I wanted my van sold, and now.  SEriously, since last night when it finally did sell, I’ve felt worse and worse about it.  No, I’m not having second thoughts about it being sold, that’s not the dreaded feeling I’m having, it’s the ‘why-should-I-ever-buy-a-newer-vehicle-again-if-it’s-going-to-get-undersold-again’ feeling.  Yeah, a big worded feeling but I can’t help it.

I’ve never thought I should make money from a vehicle, never.  It is definitely not an investment whatsoever (hell, neither is a house technically until it’s paid off, but that’s another rant ), so I’ve never thought that when I sold a vehicle that I should make any money.

I’ve had quite a few vehicles in my life.  A 1970 Chevette, 1985 T-Bird, 1975 GMC truck, 1990 GM S15, 1985 Honda Accord, 1996 Chev Blazer, 1993 GM Z71 truck, 2003 GM truck, 2005 Chev Aveo, and a 2006 Pontiac Montana (can you believe me naming all those brand names? *snort*).  Technically the Chevette didn’t belong to me, so I didn’t have to sell it, but my parents got $50 for it (it ran but had a lot wrong with it).  The only vehicles I figure I did alright on were my t-bird and the 1993 truck.  The t-bird was because I only sold it for $200 less than what I bought it for used, and it was only about a year or so I had it.  The truck had 250,000 km on it (diesel) and we ran it hard, it had hail damage and we didn’t expect anything out of it (and were happy to get the $2,500 we got!).  The rest of them I always felt I got the short end of the stick in the selling.  That’s not to say that I didn’t get any deals when I bought them, but for some reason or another, some out of my control, when it came to selling them, I lost a lot of money.

The first truck I owned I had to sell it because I was moving and going to school and couldn’t afford to keep it up, so I undersold it to get it out of my hair.  The Honda had 230,000 km on it, but it’s a Honda and should’ve kept it’s value, but for some odd reason, we undersold it.  The Blazer was the heart breaker.  It wasn’t horribly expensive to buy, and we used it well, but being that it was a special edition with leather seating, we got hosed because Chev had switched to the new body style and no one was buying the older, boxier version anymore.  This van is another thing, all of a sudden there is a flood of vans on the market, but that’s not the biggest problem.  The biggest problem is our need to sell it so we don’t have a new trailer payment (oh yeah, did I mention we bought a new trailer?) and so we don’t have 3 vehicles to insure.

Dh just drove the van off today.  On one hand I’m so happy to see it go.  That means we can drive our truck again (after it’s out of the shop for a recall repair), have only 2 vehicles again (so rearranging vehicles to get the last one parked in the single wide driveway is gone to the wayside) to drive and insure, and the stress is gone from dh’s eyes (he truly internalizes any stress, like most men).  But on the other hand, I’m sad that we lost $6,000 in a vehicle in 6 months.  Yes, you read that amount right.  In 6 months of owning it (since October), we lost a third of it’s value.  But yet, it’s a nice vehicle, but no one wants the domestic vans anymore, you can see it with how many are up for sale at dealerships.

Well, it’s gone, it’s done and I’ll just have to get over this silliness.  The consolation is I get to drive my truck again.  The panic will start again when we apply to adopt again and have to replace this truck with a 6 seater truck.

Oi

Oh buy my van already

Yeah, I know, I’m selling my van already. Yes, yes, I know. For those of you that are avid readers of my insanely random thought vomit, you know that I’ve been a rebel to test drive like a mad woman, and we ended up buying a van just last August. We’ve only had the thing for 6 months and have only put on 7000 km, which is pretty darn good considering we’ve gone skiing and travelling in it. But about a month ago, I pulled into the driveway with it and got an awful sinking feeling that we weren’t supposed to buy the damn thing. I just looked up and saw our beautiful truck just sitting there, unused, idle and I miss driving the damn thing. It’s such a nice truck and boy do I miss heated seats in the winter. We just could not have insurance on 3 vehicles the whole year, so we decided to split the insurance and we want to get the van sold before May 15th as that is when the insurance kicks back in for the truck. We’d have to extend the insurance on the van to sell it.

So, we’re selling the van. But, it’s been an issue as it is spring time (well, unless you look outside and then you can’t really tell it’s spring) and everybody tries to sell their stuff starting in the spring. Houses, trailers, vehicles, all have an increase in sellers in the spring. The market is flooded with vans locally, so we’ve dropped the price by quite an amount, almost to wholesale pricing (ok, not quite that low, but about half way between retail and wholesale) and we’ve now had 2 calls … in a month. Not a good sign.

We’ve branched out a bit, by ‘branched out’ I mean that we’ve tried various places to get the word out that we’re selling it. By mouth, a free local web listing, Craigslist, paid ad in a local online sellers place and a friend offered her online site for work. I’ve also posted on my Facebook (yes, I used the actual word for it … hey, I want to sell my van ), which is a huge network of people. 2 calls total, and only from the paid site.

Oi.

Just don’t feel like it

I’m having one of those days again.  One of those days where I don’t feel like doing jack shit.  Yup, I have done some laundry (the boy needs diapers) and tidied the van for the potential buyer, but other than that I have done zip, nil, nada, zilch, nothing.  And boy does it feel good.  I think it’s imperative that I do these kind of days occasionally.

I know everyone’s heard or read the story of the mom who does nothing one day so when her dh comes home to chaos and asks what she did that day, she finally gets to respond ‘nothing’.  I have those days often enough, and my house doesn’t end up like that.  Maybe it’s because I do the bare minimum unlike the mom in that story.  She doesn’t even feed the kids, they get to fend for themselves and probably had ice cream for breakfast and lunch (mmm, ice cream) whereas I would go to jail, or feel horribly guilty, for not feeding Sweet Pea because at 7 months old he can’t fend for himself.  Sure he’s starting to hold his own bottle, pick up food off his high chair tray, and even attempting to sit up on his own:

-My plane looks mighty strange from this angle.

-what mom?

But fend for himself completely so I can have an ‘off’ day? Nah, even I’m not that lazy.

I enjoy days like these, I usually get caught up on books, play a lot of puzzles online, get a couple of cute pictures, and get a good lazy post on my blog.  See, I’m already getting on in my day .

Not sure of a good thought vomit title

This’ll most likely be a medley of topics, so there isn’t a true title to envelop it all.

The funeral was fantastic.  Can I even say that about a funeral?  Have I ever heard of someone describing a funeral as ‘great’?  Well, it was, it truly was.  I miss him terribly, but it was such a great way to pay tribute to the guy and remember him without relentless sobbing, that I must use the word ‘fantastic’ to describe it.  Gramma was of course shaky and unsure, but I can understand it, so was I.  How do you prepare for a funeral that really isn’t a funeral, nor was it truly a wake.  Hell, it had an open bar and an open mic!

We arrived in town on Sunday, had a great time swimming & watersliding in the hotel and drove around to our old spots, as we used to live there.  It was weird to see the old house torn down, but definitely understandable at its age and stage of decay.

We arrived at the ‘funeral’, for lack of another word, on Monday to a lot of smiling faces as these were family I hadn’t seen in a long time.  We’re a huggy family anyway, so it was no different with the exception of Grampa being gone.  I missed his usual grunt and raspy voice.

I had a cousin come up to me, hug me and say she’s read my blog.  At first I was completely taken aback as I didn’t even seem to associate this as a public domain.  Stupid? Of course it is, but it’s still odd to have someone you rarely see tell you they’ve read your thought vomit.  At first I was a little intimidated, not because she’s read my thoughts, but because I wondered if others had been reading it too, especially people I’ve written about.  I know I haven’t written about her (hi LL!), but I’m sure I’ve written of other family members, heck of things on here that I’m not sure they even know about.  Do I feel a little intimidated?  yeah, a little, but not enough to stop .

Would I be intimidated and post less if I knew my mom or my brother were reading my blog?  Maybe.  My il’s? Definitely.  Truthfully, I’d most likely even hesitate to post my inner thoughts and just leave it to slowly die.  I could always set it to private and just ignore requests to read it from those I want to spare, but then what’s the true purpose of me having a blog online, I could just have it on my computer then.

I can’t see me ever truly placing a filter between my brain and my fingers in order to spare the feelings of my readers.  I’m just not that kind of girl really.  I’ve always maintained that this blog is in existence for my soul’s purpose.  Meaning I have very little chance in my real life for talk like this and I need my chance for my brain to vomit its musings out or I’m sure it’d explode, or just go insane.  I can always tell when I need to get something out as it tends to override any other thoughts and I tend to snap easier.  Ooo, maybe I should blog a lot more, then I won’t be a bitch as much….*snort*, yeah right.

It’s tomorrow

No, I don’t mean that time has warped and it’s actually tomorrow today, but that his funeral is tomorrow.  Or shall I say ‘wake’ since it’s not technically a funeral.

I’ve had my fair share of funerals, some for young adults, some for mid-age persons, and a few for the old.  Every single one of them has had a similar layout; family & friends gathering at a funeral home, chatting, sitting in pews facing a coffin with picture boards of the dead, a bazillion flowers, while a guy who has no knowledge of the deceased stands up at the front and preaches, often about the bible, God and the love of Jesus, with a dabbling of who the person was in life (obviously pre-thought out with snippets from the family).  Most have held a grave-side service somewhere of a similar nature, and only 1 had singing of hymns.

Tomorrows funeral is something I’m actually looking forward to a little bit.  Not the crying part, that part I’ve almost had enough of this week, but it’s the most different funeral I’ve ever heard of.

It’s at a golf course.  Yes, I’m dead serious.  The family is very practical, and loving and respectful of the actual person who died.  So it seems fitting that the guy who golfed regularly until the year before he died would have a gathering for his death at his second home (hell he even used to get special permission to drive on the tee boxes and up to the greens because he couldn’t walk far).

He’s already been cremated, so there will be no coffin, and weirdly enough, we are having a family pow-wow before the wake to decide what to do with his ashes.  There can be legal ramifications if you are caught spreading anyone’s ashes.  The funeral home director made sure it was stated that itty-bitty part ‘if you are caught’.  He then proceeded to tell Gramma that if she chose to spread his ashes to not tell anyone (what a guy!).

The event is going to be more like a mini-family reunion than a funeral, even though he’s dead it’ll be almost like we’re talking to him when we’re talking to all the family as we all have a bit of him inside us.

My grampa was a rebel.  I don’t mean crazy-drug-doing-vandalising youth, but rebellious nonetheless.  He was raised Nazarene, and for those of you who don’t know, it’s one of the more rigorous sects of Christianity in that there is no fun, no laughter, well, not seriously, but there isn’t any dancing allowed!LOL!  My grampa being raised in that most likely decided that he wasn’t going to have anyone tell him he couldn’t do anything because it was against the rules.  So in his 30s, he and a buddy landed a plane on Miami beach.  Oh sure, in the paper it was said that it was declared an emergency landing, but seriously people, was Miami beach their only recourse?  Pfft, yeah right.

He also didn’t start saving for retirement until he was about 60.  He just turned to my dad one day and said he guesses he better start saving soon, and the year he died at 81 (my previous post was wrong on his age) well lets just say he wasn’t poor by any means.

He just didn’t do things by the rules, so doesn’t it seem so absolutely fitting that he have a wake in lieu of a funeral at a golf course instead of a funeral home?  I think so, and I’m almost happy to go.

It has happened

I’ve gotten to a point in my life where death is more normal than it was not so long ago.  Seriously, if I think about it, not so long ago if someone were to die, it was an oddity of some sort, either cancer at a young age, accident, young heart attack, or even suicide.  I’ve experienced them all, but when this death happened it wasn’t so out of the ordinary, but age related.

My grandfather was born in 1921 (I think he was 87 anyway) to a family of 15 other brothers and sisters (would have been 16 but for an infant death).  A huge family by anyone’s standards.  This family has always kept in touch like no other family I’ve ever seen.  We do tri-annual reunions with the entire family, yes, all 16 brothers and sisters’ familes attempt to come.  I think our record reunion was about 250 people.  It allowed us to get to know the extended family, but to also keep in touch with our closer ones.  Which means I got to spend time with my grampa there, plus every other year at Christmas and yearly summer excursions to their local waterslide hotel with my cousins.

When dh and I married, we moved to my Grandparents’ town and started college.  I saw them weekly for just less than a year and I really became close to them in that time, and even started working for him at the business he owned.

About 5 or 6 years ago, or so, he developed congestive heart failure.  It was a scary time, but he got dubbed the energizer bunny because of his stubborn come back.  Yes, ten years is a seriously long time to live with only 25% capacity heart function, but with my gramma’s serious managing experience, he was kept alive 10 years from the sheer desire of that lovely woman, and his stubborn ass.

2 years ago, he broke his back.  It was quite the blow to a guy who was still a little mobile.  He had to spend a lot of time in the hospital, then therapy, then a lot of healing time at home with a new recumbant motorized chair and a walker.  3 months after that, he broke it again, but in a different place.  Yes, again.  Then probably 10 months later he broke a hip.  What’s still unbelievable is he recovered from those injuries.  As a life-long diabetic, his ability to heal should have been seriously altered, but he recovered.

Things were good until last week (Monday the 24th) when he was admitted into the hospital for a funny heart.  Not really surprising as he’s had this disease for a long time.  Thursday he was joking that he wanted to go home and asked gramma to bring him his clothes.  By the next Thursday night his kidneys as well as his mind failed, as he said to gramma, ‘get me a 2X6, you’ve given me a 2X4, I can’t finish the renovations then’.  That night he became non-responsive.  The dr’s figure that he had a brain stem stroke, something that is fatal.

The family started to go visit.  Their town is 3 hours from me, so it was with a bit of a heavy heart that I decided we wouldn’t go.  I wanted the girls to remember him as he was, not full of tubes and IVs gurgling in a hospital bed.  I hated telling them, it was just awful.

I kind of hate that I’ve gotten to a point where death is more ‘normal’. I get it, I do, I know death is a part of life, but I sure as hell don’t have to like it, I just have to accept it.

RIP John Mervyn.