This week I’m starting a new series on how to sell your home, based on our experience of doing it with three kids under the age of five. Part 1 of 4. In Part 2, I’ll provide more practical tips about how to declutter and stage the home for sale. In Part 3, I’ll share more about how to keep the house show-ready, and in Part 4, I’ll discuss how to market and sell a home by owner.
To kick off this series, I feel like it’s important to note that there are a few things I recommend NOT doing in the process of selling your home. Things like:
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- Keeping your kids at home 24-7
- Not enlisting the help of a housecleaner or babysitter or anyone that could make the process easier on you
- Listing your house during the middle of a global pandemic
Now that you know what NOT to do, I’ll unpack our story in a little more detail.
This isn’t our first time to sell a home
As a military family, we move roughly every two to three years. In the last five years, we’ve lived in five homes in four different states. (So…maybe the two-to-three-year time frame is a little generous).
We’ve pretty much done it all when it comes to renting and owning – owning a home, renting out our home, being a renter, renting sight unseen, having a landlord decide not to extend our lease and being forced to move ourselves (still a little miffed about that one).
By the time we reached our current duty station, we were a little tired of rentals and there were very few rental options available. Based on the local housing market, we decided it was time to look at buying again.
We were excited to own our own space again…to be able to decorate and paint and make it our own. However, I don’t think I fully considered the fact that ,if and when it came time to sell, I would be doing so with three littles at home.
Selling a home by owner
I’ve sold two homes for sale by owner (FSBO). The first house we sold by owner was to renters that were already living in our home. It was a pretty simple process. The second we listed ourselves and it went under contract in less than a week.
But I had no children at the time. Keeping the house staged and clean for a week of showings was relatively easy.
Selling a home with three kids under the age of five is a different story.
Selling a home with three kids under the age of five during a global pandemic is something else entirely.
And selling a home with three kids under the age of five during a global pandemic when you don’t know if you’re actually going to end up moving…well now that’s just bordering on insanity.
Note: My oldest turned five in the middle of all of this, so I guess I can’t say three under five anymore.
First, a little backstory
Last November hubs started talking about potential future job opportunities. It looked likely that we would PCS (permanent change of station…another word for moving in the military), so we talked through our options.
By the time January rolled around, we still didn’t know anything definitive about a move. But I did know that if we were going to sell our home, we didn’t want to miss the spring selling cycle.
When we first moved here two years ago, homes were literally going under contract before they officially went on the market. I wanted to be one of those homes!
How to sell a home with young kids
So in January, I started researching how to sell a home with young children. In the two years we have lived in this house, at no point has the entire house been clean at the same time. Usually as I am cleaning one room, the kids are destroying another. How in the world could I keep a house show-ready with young kids?
So I did what any mom would do…I headed to Pinterest to see how other moms managed to list and sell a home with young children actually living there.
Unfortunately, most of the advice I got wasn’t overly helpful. Most of the posts were written by moms of one young child…not three. It was at that moment that I figured I probably needed to write a post (or four) on the subject…you’re welcome.
The most common suggestions were:
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- Rent a storage unit
- Put away all the kid’s toys
- Take the kid’s toys to grandma’s house
- Take the kid to grandma’s house
- Get rid of clutter
1. Get rid of clutter
I decided to start with the last suggestion.
My first step was to find somewhere I could send the kids for a couple days so I could actually focus on organizing and decluttering the house.
Spoiler alert: When you have three young kids, that is not a simple feat. I ultimately couldn’t find anywhere for them to go.
I settled on my backup plan – a few mornings at the local parents’ morning out program in town. Mind you this is only three hours of care, and by the time I factored in drive time, I was left with a 2.5hr time block. This was compounded by trying to find days that had openings in three different classrooms on the same day. I ultimately scheduled a couple of sessions – once every few weeks. It wasn’t a lot of time, but at least it was something! I could be home alone to concentrate on what needed to be done.
2. Sketch out a timeline
My next task was to pick a list date and work backwards to figure out what needed to be accomplished each week so the house would be ready by the list date. I chose March 12. I reasoned that the house would be listed in time to attract anyone home shopping over spring break.
From mid January to March I spent all my spare time working on the house. I searched Pinterest for more home organization and staging tips. I organized each room of the house and catalogued items to sell. I filled bags of clothes and unused items to donate. I read the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. (No, it won’t help you sell your home, but it will help you declutter your life). I decorated walls that were still bare to make sure each room looked complete & purposed.
It was exhausting. By the time March arrived, I had made great progress, but I realized the house still wouldn’t be quite ready by March 12. I still needed to photograph the home and get the home listing ready to go (since we were again doing for sale by owner).
I talked to hubs about delaying the posting by a week to give myself more time. Since we still didn’t have any orders to move, I figured one week wouldn’t really matter.
Hubs was on board with my plan to delay the listing by a week. I spent time analyzing all the comps in my area and decided on the home price. Showings were beginning to pick up. I even had a friend whose home sold in under 24 hours.
3. Get the help you need
Since in the time we have lived here, the house has never been entirely clean at the same time, I hired a house cleaner to help me out while the home was on the market. I planned to keep my kids out of the house as much as humanly possible. I thought for sure we would be under contract by early April. Oh the best laid plans.
I posted to my Facebook feed to let people know our house would be available soon.
And then I hit my first snag. On March 13, we received notice that the girls preschool was cancelled for two weeks.
Hubs and I discussed holding off listing the home, but we were both fairly confident in our moving timeline and decided to go for it anyways.
On March 19, I clicked submit for our house to go live on Zillow.
On March 20, a shelter-in-place order was issued for our state.
What had I done?? Not only were my kids out of school, I now couldn’t take them anywhere and I no longer had a housekeeper coming to help me.
I quickly reasoned that no one would actually come look at a house for sale during a shelter-in-place order. People would just look at the photos online and come see it when it was safe to do so. Perhaps I didn’t need to worry about showing a messy house.
That sense of security lasted a few days. until I got my first phone call. Were we open to doing showings?
Umm, I don’t know. Maybe?
The next thing I knew I was frantically cleaning the house during nap time so we could have a house showing. The next week I did it again. And then again. It was exhausting.
In the meantime our moving assignment got turned off…sort of. “There’s a global pandemic. We’re not sure if we’re sending you or what a timeline would look like.”
Should we take the house off the market? That could look odd if we took it off and put it back on. What if the assignment gets turned back on? What if the housing market crashes? We had more questions than answers.
In case you were wondering, we kept the house on the market. We have a ton of views and saves on Zillow. So the odds of someone eventually wanting our home are in our favor.
But this sprint to clean the house for showings…this having strangers walk through our home when we’re not going anywhere other than home…this being home with the kids 24/7 and finding activities that are entertaining, but not too messy…this driving around in circles while people walk through our home because we can’t actually go anywhere…this is crazy.
4. Embrace the challenge
How to sell a home with kids? Embrace the challenge.
I assumed selling a house with small children would be difficult. This I have no words for…and yet…I am doing it.
If you had told me two years ago that this would happen, I probably would have said no thank you. Hard pass.
But we do the hard things because that’s what life requires of us. We face challenges we never thought we would face and do things we never thought we would or could do. We rise to the challenge. Because we can’t choose what happens. We can only choose how we respond to what happens.
We still haven’t received an offer.
We’re taking the home selling process one day at a time. We are embracing the challenge and continuing to make the best decisions with the limited amount of information available to us.
Selling a home with young children is challenging, regardless of a global pandemic. Still, if you have the choice of selling during a pandemic or not…just pass on the pandemic. You won’t regret it!
