Reflections
Our house is officially live on the market. We’ve had the professional cleaners, the sales stagers, the photographer/videographer with the drone. Everything looks amazing, so crisp and neutral. And it feels like we can’t even live in our own home comfortably. The address is the same, but the home is no longer ours.
Within an hour of our listing going live, we received our first request for a showing. Exciting, yes, but getting evicted from your own home so strangers can tromp about and criticize your decorating decisions is just plain awkward. It’s hard to relax in a home that always has to be ready for a tour. The towels remain folded “just so”, the kitchen wiped down obsessively, the beds made ready for a Crate & Barrel catalogue. All of this with two big dogs and a yard full of birds.
It’s pretty exhausting.
My Solution
I remind my husband that we’re playing a game. As stressful and tiring as it is to keep our home “always ready” for a showing, we’re doing this for a reason. We want to get top dollar for our beautiful home of 20 years so that we can strategically reinvest these hard-built funds into our new Kentucky farm. We’re cutting the size of our home by more than half (thank God!) and getting 10x the acreage in this exchange. This transition won’t be easy nor will it be cheap. We take extra time each morning to tidy up and wipe things down so the house shines.
“We’re not selling a home, we’re selling a lifestyle”, I remind Mike. I don’t just want a buyer, I want a family that falls head over heels with our Palmer Divide homestead. Upon getting settled, I want this new family to take his homestead to the next level. What a way to honor this house and the land it sits on! This is worth a little effort to keep the place show-ready.
Your Key Takeaways
Selling a home requires a mindset shift: you need to treat your personal living space as an “always-on” product in order to maximize your investment. While this process is exhausting and awkward, reframing the inconvenience as a strategic, short-term “game” with a clear, valuable end goal—like funding a dream farm—makes the daily effort worthwhile.