Preparing a house for sale

Chris gets ready to
pressure wash

It's spring, and you know what that means -- EVERYTHING STARTS HAPPENING ALL AT ONCE!!!

First the daffodils pop up, then the asparagus, seeds start germinating, and the weeds are right behind.  Apparently spring is also the time everyone gets out of hibernation mode and decides to purchase houses, and so the real estate market picks up the pace, along with construction trades, cleaning services, landscaping businesses, and just about everybody jacks up their prices because their services are so much in demand.  Given our budget lockdown and our general DIY mentality, we've opted to save thousands of dollars by doing most of the work ourselves.

About 2am in our respective sanding gear --
Bea sanding drywall mud patches,
Chris sanding concrete countertops
with an antique belt sander

So for a large part of April (about 3 weeks all told), we have been embroiled in the heretofore unexperienced process of getting a house ready for sale.  This is a house we bought in 2012, spending that whole summer working nonstop to completely gut the kitchen and make numerous other improvements throughout the house, to finish all the work within about 30 minutes of when our tenants rolled up in their Uhaul.  By nonstop, we mean getting only 4-5 hours of sleep each night and working the rest of the hours of the day, with our only “break-time" being to grab more jumbo coffees at 7-Eleven on our way back to the house from a Home Depot run.

Bea after collecting 2 years' worth of
fallen leaves & invasives -- ¡Ay, ay, ay!

Well, those old patterns have come to haunt us again this month as we've worked virtually around the clock to get everything ready for a photographer, who we had to allow 10 days prior to our list date in order to coordinate schedules, weather, and whatever other factors they consider to make a house look its best.  The main difference this time is that now we live 3 hours away rather than around the block, so we camped out up in Maryland for a week at a time while we did this project.

We are both really happy with the end result of all our hard work and we hope somebody will fall in love with the house and buy it soon!  We didn't take a ton of photos, but here's a quick snapshot of some of the stuff we've done in the past three weeks:

Roof before...

Roof halfway cleaned -- this pressure washer really makes a difference!

After sitting on the curb for half an hour with dozens of paint swatches
trying to pick what color of front door would complement mint green,
we both finally agreed on this color: Behr's Southern Blue!

Bea painting the door

Chris with his infamous Butt Markers:
Getting ready to hang an interior door that needed replacing

Chris chopped down a tree & burnt its branches while pretending to stomach a beer in a cobalt bottle

so that Bea can make a beautiful bottle tree one day when she has saved up enough bottles.

Our T-bracer was too short for the cabinet adjustment we needed to do,
so Bea built a pyramid base of milk crate, bucket, & 2x4.  We somehow survived this terrible idea!

After days of de-rusting, spray painting, and finally a terrifying awning-hanging/ladder-fear/head-crushing experience, Bea stands proudly with our refurbished awning!

Not that you can judge a book by its cover, or a house by its street view.  But...
We're pretty pleased with how all our improvements came out over the past couple of years!

Home again, home again!

Back in the hoophouse, our pathways had grown outta control
but most of our in-ground plants survived the neglect.

However, our spring transplants didn't enjoy the lack of water
& suffered the slow death of dehydration :-(
A few have since been resurrected.
Happy Easter!