For more about our story and selling a house with young kids, read part one of this series. Part three will focus on how we managed to keep the house clean for showings.  In part four, I’ll discuss how to market and sell a home by owner.

Having your house on the market and keeping it clean for showings when you have young children is challenging. However, I would contend that the hardest part is actually getting the home prepped and ready to sell. 

Unless you are already a minimalist or you have family nearby to help, it can be difficult to find the time to do the necessary decluttering and staging. But effort in on the back end will make the actual selling process much easier and make your home more appealing to potential buyers. 

When we moved into our current home, I had a one-year-old, three-year-old, and I was three months pregnant with my third child. At no point in the entire two years we have lived here has our entire house been clean at the same time. And, in fact, until I started prepping to sell our home, I hadn’t finished decorating the house. 

Side note: In three pregnancies, I’ve moved three times. I don’t recommend moving while pregnant.

Besides the time and money it requires to decorate a new home, I was exhausted from trying to keep up with two toddlers while pregnant. That exhaustion was soon replaced with the exhaustion of taking care of a newborn and two toddlers. What is sleep?

Prepping the Home For Sale

But as January approached, I knew there was a good chance we’d be moving this summer. If I wanted to sell our house quickly, we needed to start prepping sooner rather than later. Since we planned to sell by owner, there were three key phases that I focused on:

• • The decluttering phase
  • The decorating/staging phase
  • The listing phase

I set a time frame to go through each room of the house – starting with our desired list date and working backwards. That way I could evaluate how I was doing at staying on track with what needed to get done. 

The Decluttering/Organizing Phase

As I mentioned in part one, I paid for a couple of mornings at the local Parents Morning Out program. I used this time without the kids at home to really focus on decluttering and staging the home.

The goal with this phase was not to completely declutter the home, but rather to make the house look uncluttered. I mentioned in part one of this series that I read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

Her method focuses on an in-depth decluttering of the home. While I found her methodology intriguing, her approach is built around a six-month window of time to truly go through everything in your home.

I’m still interested in much of what she said, simply because we will be significantly downsizing our home. In order to do that, we definitely need to go through everything. 

But with a house that I needed to have on the market in just a couple of months, my primary goal was getting the house ready to list. 

I’ve looked at hundreds of houses listed for sale online (yes, my husband and I have been known to do this for fun…we are weird) and one issue I notice immediately is how much clutter is visible. It’s usually an indication that there isn’t great storage space in the home. 

The goal of decluttering to sell a home is to make the home look uncluttered – to create a sense of spaciousness (whether or not it actually exists). The potential buyer needs to believe that there is a space and a place for everything. 

This is why some people end up renting a storage unit to put belongings in while the house is listed for sale. We’ve never done that, but I do try to do a massive clean out of things we no longer need before putting a house on the market. Here are some specific things I tackled during this phase:

Baby Items 

After having three babies in 3.5 years, we’ve accumulated a LOT of baby stuff. It was kind of taking over the house. So I catalogued and sorted through all of our baby items to figure out what we were still using and what we could sell or donate. I consolidated all of the baby items into specific areas (mostly the nursery) so it wasn’t really taking over the house anymore.

The Kitchen

After going through baby items, the kitchen pantry was next on my list. It had never truly been organized…just stuffed full of things. I took almost everything out of the pantry, got rid of the piles of things on the floor and make it look a little less overwhelming. I also carved out space for the kitchen appliances that were all over my kitchen counters. Although I didn’t move them into the pantry immediately, I had a plan for where I would put each item currently on my counter (with the exception of the coffee pot) once we started showing the house.

I also took time to declutter the drawers in my kitchen. If you’re like me, you have a junk drawer that seems to accumulate everything. I cleaned it all out so that if someone were to open a drawer, it would look organized. 

Bedrooms/Closets 

Next I focused on the upper level of our home. Again, I wanted everything to look as spacious as possible. I refolded everything in our linen closet. There’s just something about a closet that looks organized, versus one that appears to be overflowing. 

 

In the nursery, I put away the changing pad and organized the closet (where I was storing most of the baby items). In the older girls’ room, I emptied out a drawer in their dresser. This created a space that I could easily toss all the blankets and stuffed animals from their beds into during home showings. 

Our bedroom was easier to tackle because we had already been planning to install shelving in the master closet. We pulled everything out of the closet and hubs painted both the closet and the master bathroom. Once the shelving and double racks had been installed, I sorted through everything in our closet before putting it back. I got rid of several pairs of shoes and clothing I knew didn’t bring me joy and that I would never wear ago. 

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Ah yes, back to Marie Kondo. Her recommendation is to toss everything that does not “spark joy” or is not useful. While this is a generally good guideline to follow, it doesn’t really prepare you for a global pandemic. 

As I was going through everything in my closet, I came across my collection of nail polishes. I tried to remember the last time I had painted my nails myself and I frankly couldn’t remember. So I decided they were no longer needed and tossed all of them. 

Eight weeks into a stay-at-home order with no nail salons open for the foreseeable future…I’m starting to regret that decision a little bit. I guess you can’t win them all.

The Basement 

My last big project to tackle was our basement.

We have a finished living area (that’s been a work in progress the entire time we’ve lived here – see photos below ) and bedroom, along with an unfinished storage area.

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For the last year and a half I had just been moving everything we no longer used or needed to the basement storage area to eventually sort through. On top of that, we stored basically everything that we hadn’t used in a while in the bedroom closet (e.g. all the craft supplies and hobbies we had before kids).

The basement took the longest by far to sort through, but I eventually conquered the piles of stuff down there. In the end, I ended up donating about 20 bags of stuff. 

With the house decluttered enough for listing, it was time to begin the home staging phase.

 

The Home Staging Phase

I’m just going to breeze past the home repairs/updates phase. If you have maintenance you need to do on the home or crazy paint colors on the wall, I would recommend that you go ahead and take care of those things. Paint is perhaps the biggest homeowner offense I see online. I can’t tell you how many homes I’ve looked at that come with a bright red wall. It’s a relatively inexpensive thing to paint something a neutral color, but it can make a huge difference in the look and feel of the home. 

Over the course of the last two years, we’ve pretty much repainted the entire house. (And by we, I mean hubs).

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Now onto staging the home. Some realtors will tell you to take all the personality out of a home before you list it. Take down any family photos and try to leave a blank canvas. The idea is that the potential buyer will be able to see themselves living in the home. 

As a general rule, I believe the guiding principle should be your home should tell a story that the buyer wants to be invited into. I’ll go into this idea into more detail in my next post, but the point is that a staged home does not have void of personality.

You just want to make sure that it would appeal to a large percentage of buyers and create a canvas that people want to see themselves living in.

In other words, the photography and staging of your home should tell a story that entices a buyer to want to live there. 

Each room should convey a purpose. it’s hard for many people to picture their belongings in an empty house. This is why staging an empty house is popular. 

Here are some photos that show what we did to decorate and stage the home.

THE LOFT

THE MASTER BATHROOM

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THE OFFICE

THE FRONT DOOR

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THE KITCHEN

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THE BASEMENT

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THE BREAKFAST NOOK

How to Stage and Photograph a Home with Young Kids

The truth is I took all the photos myself. I was on a time crunch because I only had 2.5 hours to tackle organizing/cleaning several rooms and take photos before I had to pick up my kids from the PMO program. I basically just moved clutter from one room to the next while I was taking photos.

In case you needed proof of this, the images below were taken only hours apart. Usually the drop zone is cluttered with the girls backpacks/jackets/ect. I staged the space for the photo, and then quickly put all their items back in place. I was also in the middle of collecting items to donate (that’s why all the extra bags are in the second picture).

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If you’re working with a photographer, you may be able to get the kids out of the house for the day to let them do their work. Otherwise, just take it one room at a time.

But if you’re going to take the photos yourself, just be aware of kid items in the pictures. I left some kids toys out that get played with on a regular basis, I just made sure to take all the photos either at angles where you couldn’t see the toys or to remove them from the room while I took the picture.

The basement is a good example of this. The girls have a two story doll house down there that you can’t see from the angle of the pictures. I also removed the baby chair that usually sits in our basement while taking photos.

The Listing Phase

The last phase, if you are selling a home by owner, is preparing to actually list and market the home. In part three of this series, I’ll discuss how we have managed to clean and show the house (in as little as an hour’s notice) with young kids. And finally, in part four, I’ll share more about actually listing the home and entire for sale by owner process. 

In the meantime, drop me a message below. What questions do you have about the process of listing, selling and moving with young kids?