Eventful weekend! Saturday was wall-to-wall chores and events for various members of the family; swim lessons for both girls, an alumni event for me, a bday party for one of the girls' daycare friends, and grocery shopping. NT actually had two events for a group he volunteers with, but he bowed out of both of those because it was starting to look physically impossible; he also needed to get a couple hours of work done on his final paper!

The alumni event was interesting: The speaker had moved to MN from NYC about a year ago, and she'd been a home stager for people looking to sell. She'd fallen into the profession by accident; her real estate agent told her the reason her place had sold so quickly was how she staged it, and would she mind if he gave her number to some other clients? It just sort of snowballed from there. Very cool story about taking advantage of random circumstances and a skill she didn't even know was marketable!

She shared many of her tips with us, and encouraged everyone in the room to make a plan for what they were going to get done in the month of May. AS and I came home totally inspired. So this morning, I immediately put her tips into action. I got a notepad and pen and dragged everyone out the door so we could step in and see what the first impression was and how we could improve it. Then we walked into and through each room, noting the first impression, and pointing out all the things that would need to be fixed, removed or replaced in order to stage the home.

After that, we made an "action plan" for the month. I did one better and made action plans for June and July as well! I also made a list of the things we'd do once we were sure we're moving. (We've pretty much decided we need to move before we can fully make the home sellable; we have too much stuff that we don't want to get rid of but the current home has nowhere to put it out of sight, and plus we have the cat and two small kids constantly dirtying the place up.)

From there I even made a "shopping list" divided by month, based on what we hoped to achieve each month and what we'd need in order to achieve that. AS went on Home Depot's and IKEA's websites and we started roughing out estimates of how much everything would cost.

One thing we learned from the stager was that we may need to bring in different furniture if ours isn't ideal (it isn't, see above about kids and cat!), and that it was even a good idea to put in new towels, linens and dishes, so that was an added expense we hadn't factored in. But after pricing things out a bit, we have hopes we can spruce up the kitchen for $1000-$1500 less than we were planning to spend, so hopefully we can still renovate and stage for the same amount of money as we have budgeted.

I'll share my lists, in case anyone is interested. But I'm going to paste them into separate entries so this one doesn't get excruciatingly long!