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10 Things I HATED & LOVED About Selling Our Home

Building a Home Made for Hosting

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We put our house on the market and expected it to sell immediately. Well, after 10 months of trial and error…. 10 months of wishing and hoping… 10 months of dead-end showings… we learned A LOT about the real estate market. I think we tried everything in the book when it came to tips and tricks. However, we did NOT try burrying a statue of Saint Joseph in our front yard. We were told many times that that would sell our house but we never did it. We thought it was hilarious though!! We ended up selling our house with Jenni & Co. and we were so impressed by their team!!

Jaimee from Jenni & Co.  did an incredible job being proactive and always kept us up to date. We met with Jenni and Jaimee in December and they were BOTH 8 months pregnant!! Michael and I thought to ourselves “Oh no…. They’re going to be having babies as soon as we put the house back on the market!”. We quickly realized that that didn’t matter one bit. With the help of their amazing team, we never felt like we weren’t taken care of, even in the midst of their life transitions. We were so thankful for our experience with them!! After a little over 4 weeks, we had an offer on the house and we were thrilled!!!

So, after all of this waiting, what have we learned about selling our home? We have such mixed feelings! Here are 10 things that we LOVED and 10 things that we HATED!

10 Things That We Hated:

Living in Perfection : This got old REALLY quick. Just imagine… every time you leave the house for more than two hours, you have to make sure it’s PERFECT. No clothes in the laundry room, no dishes in the sink, no dust bunnies on the floor. It was such a pain!
Hearing about what Buyers Didn’t Like : When you build a house and then you constantly hear about what buyers don’t like about your selections, it rubs you the wrong way. We eventually had to ignore all of the things we heard because we knew that we couldn’t change anything!
Constantly Answering the “Did the House Sell Yet?” question: We loved that everyone cared about the selling process… but it is hard to constantly share that there was no movement on the house at all.
Lowering the Price : We lowered the price three times and while that wasn’t what we wanted… we still made money on the sell of the house and we’re so thankful for that!
Living in Limbo : It’s hard to plan your life around the sell of a house that won’t sell. haha! We thought that our workshop LAST April was going to be the last time we used our home for education but we were so wrong! It’s hard to plan out a year when you don’t know what the future holds!
Losing Things : We would be running low on time and so we just STUFFED random things in the garage, in drawers and under the bed because we didn’t have time to truly CLEAN UP. This led to us losing SO MUCH STUFF! I just recently found my favorite scarf stuffed under a bed upstairs!
Waiting in the Car : When we had showings, we would wait in the car for an hour and a half just WONDERING if this was going to be IT! Well, after about 30 showings, that wears on you a bit.
Hiding Bokeh’s Existence : We weren’t sure if someone would be turned off by the fact that we have a dog and so every time we left the house we would hide Bokeh’s food and water bowl AND of course we had to take him with us…. which meant that we couldn’t just go to Starbucks, we HAD to stay in the car!
Not having an Office for 10 Months : That’s right… I didn’t have an office for MOST of this year! My office became a faux Dining Room!
Second Guessing EVERYTHING! : Is it our striped wall? Maybe it’s the bedroom color! Are people not interesting because my bathroom is TEAL? Is it too YOUNG looking for our neighborhood? Maybe we need to take down ALL of the decor. Maybe we need to add MORE decor? I’m so CONFUSED!! What are we doing wrong!? It was a bit miserable at times, but we made it through!!!

10 Things That We Loved:

Having Time to Plan : We gained SO much clarity and wisdom from having almost a YEAR of waiting. We have a more well-thought-out house design, we have more clarity about a future project we were working on, and we have a better perspective on what it looks like to truly TRUST God’s timing.
Living in Perfection : As much as we hated cleaning the house constantly, we did enjoy living in a SPOTLESS house most of the time! It’s nice to come home to a house in perfect condition after a long wedding day!
Learning about the Real Estate World : We sold our current house in ten months but we also sold our rental house in 12 DAYS! So, after this season of crazy real estate transactions, we realized that there is so much about real estate that we never knew! It’s fun learning about this industry in such a hands-on way! In the last 6 months we will have experienced 4 major real estate transactions!! Crazy-town!
Evening walks on the Land : When we got overwhelmed we would walk Bokeh Boy on the land. He LOVES it over there!!! It’s was bittersweet walking around the property because we were hopeful that it would be our home one day and yet we were worried that it may never happen. God taught us so much about trust during this time!
Time to Enjoy our Current House : We LOVE our house…. we just don’t love the limitations of where it is located. So, our waiting process gave us some more time to enjoy our current space!
Living with Open Hands : When something is beyond your control and you’ve already purchased land that you can’t return… you just have to give your situation up to God and let Him do what He wants. It’s really humbling to be a great business woman and yet I can’t do ANYTHING to make our house sell!! I learned a lot about patience, peace and trust!!
Fresh Flowers : We kept a lot of fresh flowers in the kitchen during the selling process and that’s NEVER a bad thing to have around!!!
Hearing Buyers Say that our House was Prettier than Most Model Homes! : What a compliment!! We would hear these things and then immediately think “Well if you think it’s beautiful, why don’t you BUT IT?!” haha … They just weren’t our buyers!
Sweet Encouragement : We had SO many friends reach out to us in real life, via text and via social media with sweet words of encouragement. Literally the DAY we had the showing that ended up being our buyers, I posted something on Instagram about how hard this process was and I cried reading the comments and encouragement you all left us. I’m pretty sure I looked so dramatic crying over my burrito bowl at Chipotle while scrolling through your comments.
Learning How to Love Each Other Better : I really should title this “Michael loving Katelyn” because I was the dramatic one in this entire process. Michael remained calm and logical and constant. I’m so thankful for him. He is the one who handled EVERYTHING with the realtors… EVERYTHING with the closing (that’s happening so soon!) and EVERYTHING with the moving process and apartment leasing. I don’t know how we would have done this without him. He’s such a gift to me!!!

At the end of the day, I realize that the struggles of selling a house are very much first world problems. Sure, life is stressful and this hasn’t been the most peaceful season for us but I am very aware that we are blessed to even have a house to sell… and a beautiful one at that! Michael and I have this vision of being able to use our future home to serve others in an amazing way. We know that our home will always be a gift from God and ultimately, it only exists for His purposes. We’re excited to break ground and if you want to follow along on our journey, you can follow @AHomeMadeForHosting on Instagram!!! 10 Things we Loved & Hated about Selling Our House | By Katelyn James Photography

To read about WHY we sold our new home, click HERE!

To read about where we’re going next, click HERE! 

View Other “Home Made for Hosting” Posts!

To view other PERSONAL posts, click HERE!

Thanks for reading!

— Katelyn

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