How To Survive Selling a House with Young Children

Please note: this is not a "how to sell your house in 1 showing" guide. Whenever I read those, I sort of want to throw something. Those guides don't tell you "Don't buy a house on a hill" so they really aren't that helpful to me.  This is simply a statement of what I have learned after having our house on the market for 8 months. You may think I'm not worth listening to, since I haven't actually sold the house yet, but I can whip a house into show-ready shape in 10 minutes or less. And I've been doing it for 8 months! I have been both a stay-at-home-mom and a working mom during this process. They both have their benefits and challenges, so I am going to address both angles. A lot of this I have adapated from a combination of FLY Lady and my minimalist guide Joshua Becker

Before your house goes on the market
1. Make sure you are ready. This has been a big issue for us. We feel like our first realtor sort of pressured us to list our house when we weren't ready. I think that has come back to bite us in this process. Make sure you are ready--whatever that means to you. Be brutal with yourself about how your house actually looks. Enlist friends' help to walk through your house as a buyer.
 2. Get rid of half of your stuff. Then, get rid of half again. This is a big rule for minimalists, who I have been paying a lot of attention to throughout this process. If you don't get rid of stuff now, when else are you going to do it? I've been to Good Will a total of 17 times so far (and counting). It feels so good. I've gotten rid of towels, sheets, toys, kitchen gadgets, you name it. If you don't love it or use it, why would you pack it and bring it with you? We have been redefining the word "Need" in our house big time.
 3. Have a place for everything. EVERYTHING. I have a basket in my bathroom where I put our shower stuff every day so that if a potential buyer comes in the bath tub is empty. A place for everything. *Note--if you have gotten rid of half of your stuff, this is a much easier to do.
 4. Establish a Routine. You may be a born-organized person who comes by this naturally. I am not. It's taken me years for the importance of routines to sink in. I would recommend checking out FLY Lady who has slowly but surely helped me to chip away at my bad habits and bad attitudes.

 Here is my morning routine:
1. Make the bed as soon as my feet hit the ground (I make my girls' bed as soon as they get out of it, too).
 2. *Drink Coffee*
3. Take a shower and get dressed.
 4. Clean my bathroom as I get ready. I take my shower stuff out of the shower and put it on a towel to dry. The very last thing I do after I get ready is put my shower stuff into the basket so that my bathroom is show when I walk out. I TRY to clean my bathroom counters and floors every day. But I have a LOT of hair so it's a necessary battle.
5. Put in a load of laundry
6. Empty the dishwasher. (I do this as my kids are eating breakfast most mornings)
7. Open blinds and do a room-by-room check up
8. Put my kids' shoes on the stairs for a quick-exit.

This is do-able for both working and stay at home moms. When I was working, I also turned on all the lamps before I left for work so that people can just flip on lights in each room.

 Here is my evening routine (these principles are imperative for working moms and just plain good habits for stay at home moms as well) :
 1. Clean up all toys/stuff/junk and put them where they belong. I know, easier said than done. But if you have a place for everything, it's not really so bad.
 2. Put away the clothes I washed earlier (yes it takes me all day to do a load of laundry--but I do 1 each day except I take a break on Saturdays--so it's really not that much to put away. A load a day is pretty much the best advice I ever got)
 3. Find my keys. This is really important for me because I am always leaving them in pockets, etc. So I need to find them every night.
4. Lay out my clothes and the girls' clothes for the morning, including socks and shoes. Since I'm doing so much in the morning, this is one less decision I have to make and saves a ton of time.
 5. Clean my kitchen! (Shine your sink, according to FLY Lady).

 If you do all this in the evening, the pressure is off through those crazy mornings. If there is ever an evening where I don't accomplish these things, I can almost GUARANTEE that someone will be coming by the next day. Crazy how that works!

 My mantra is "10 minutes to show ready" because COUNTLESS times I've gotten calls from people saying "I'm in your driveway--can I come in?" And all I have to say is, "give me 10 minutes," which is do-able for most buyers. I also don't stress when my kids have pulled out lots of toys because if I do get the notice that someone is coming by, I just put everything back where it belongs.

 And do you know what I do during nap times? Whatever the heck I want. Lately I've been playing Sudoku, today I'm writing this, sometimes I peruse Pinterest. Having that time to myself has been huge for me.

 One other thought I wanted to address is what my kids do while I'm scurrying around before showing the house. My perfect-world answer would be: I give my kids the creative and wonderful busy boxes I designed for them to play with or My wonderful children help me clean. But in reality, usually I just stick them in front of the TV or give one the IPad and one my phone because a) I have never created a busy box and b) my kids are not that helpful under pressure and I need to stuff put away. Judge away, I don't care.

 I hope this is helpful. I'll update this if I think of more or if you have questions feel free to ask!

Too Messy to Blog

My house is too messy to blog. This is what I always think when I read other people's blogs. I get a feeling in my stomach as I see their beautiful, smiling children crafting their homemade crafts and eating healthy lunches. But what really bothers me is that in the background of the pictures, you catch glimpses of their perfectly decorated, not at all messy houses. In general, I can never post a picture of my kids because in the background there is usually mass chaos. I can just hear the reaction now: "Wow, those are cute kids, but look at that pile of dishes!"

"Let your cleaning go," well-meaning people tell me. "Your kids are only young once, who cares?"

The problem is, this has been a life-long issue for me. As a child and teenager, my room was always a mess. In college, I could only hop from spot to spot in my room. When I got married, I knew I should have a vision of myself as an impeccable homemaker vacuuming with an apron on. But, honestly, it was such an unattainable dream that I didn't even bother.

Here's the thing: I care what my house looks like. But more than that, I care what YOU think my house looks like. The Hubs and I have MASTERED the art of, "Oh no, there's someone in the driveway, let's completely clean our house in the next 15 seconds." It's uncanny how good we are at it. Now that we have kids (who happen to be girls), I can't help but feeling like I have built-in witnesses who in about 25 years will constantly remind me of how messy our house always was.

To be fair to myself (and because I love blaming things on my mom), this mania is somewhat genetic. Before her parents would come visit us once a year, we spent a week completely cleaning our house from top to bottom. I think it was my mom's goal to have NOTHING for my grandma to do when she came to visit, as she loved to find something to clean every time she visited. "She was just trying to be helpful," you might say. But so help me, she cleaned out our refrigerator trays, swept our driveway, and cleaned our vents. My grandma had a very dear friend, who also happened to be my grandpa's sister. They were best friends growing up. Every time my grandma talks about her, she says, "Doris sure couldn't keep a house." It's my greatest fear in life for my people to say of me, "Katie is a wonderful person, but she sure can't keep a house."

I can't help but think that there are more people like me out there. You would like to blog to document your life or your kids' life (one less thing for them to blame ME for, right? I can just hear it now: "Mom, why didn't you blog every detail of my life? Everyone else's moms blogged!") But you don't blog because you fear that people will look a little too closely at the background of your pictures and see your piles of laundry and dishes, or the stacks of mail you haven't gone through, or, heaven forbid, the floor underneath your 2 year old's dinner chair.

You are out there, right? Right??