Our Pre-Moving Checklist

Did you see the news last week? Corey and I are getting ready to sell our home and move to a smaller one! If you’re totally confused and asking me why in the world this is all happening, go back and read this post. Once you’re all caught up, you can come back and read this one.

You good? Okay. So. I promised I’d share some details about all of the things we need to accomplish before we can list our house, and this is the post. The list isn’t actually all that long, but it’s meaty – you never realize how many things you’re putting off in your home until you go to sell it and realize it’s in a completely unacceptable state.

Whoops.

We’ve already started to work on a few of the things on this list – I wish I had a timeline of how long I think it will take us to do it all, but it all depends on when we can afford various things. The whole point of moving is to get out of debt, so we’re being careful not to add to our debt in the process of getting our house ready to sell. Thankfully, a lot of the things on this list are actually cheap or free – it’s just the two or three big ones that are going to hold us back.

Ready to see the list?

Our Pre-Moving To Do List:

• Replace the flooring in the kitchen. We replaced most of the flooring in the lower level of our house with vinyl plank a few years back, but we never got around to doing the kitchen. I actually just finished this one up this week – you can see a peek of it in the Facebook Live I did last week.
• Install baseboards downstairs. We’ve been waiting to do this until the kitchen is complete, which means we haven’t had baseboards downstairs for three years. Sigh. We obviously have to do this before we can sell our house.
• Patch the ceiling in the kitchen. There are two spots in the ceiling in the kitchen that need to be patched. One is from when we knocked down some cabinets right after we bought the house and never fixed it, and the other is from a small leak we had last year. This is incredibly cheap and easy, we’re apparently just lazy.

• Replace the kitchen counters. This is one of the big ones. I painted the countertops in our kitchen a while back as a stop-gap measure before we could replace them, and it’s time to finally get it done. The paint isn’t in awesome shape anymore (it held up really well for about a year, but the paint has officially reached its full lifespan) and so we’re going to have to do something about it. We’re not going to throw a lot of money into this, just something that’s good enough. Any ideas for us?
• Add transitions to the flooring. We never added a transition between the flooring in our bedroom and the master bathroom. We already have the transition. We just haven’t put it in. There are a couple of other places that need one too. Super easy. Free. Again, we’re just lazy.
• Refinish the staircase. Another big one. We replaced the carpet both downstairs and upstairs with vinyl plank flooring, but the stairs are still carpeted. The carpet was in rough shape and the top two steps have been naked for the last year or so from when I finished the flooring upstairs. We can’t leave it as-is, so we’ll have to do something about it – I already ripped up the carpet and we’re weighing a few different options before we get started.
• Re-paint our bedroom. If you follow my Instagram stories, you’ll know I’ve been talking about this for a while and that I finally got it done this week. We had planned on painting it a similar bold color to what it is now, but obviously now that we’re selling we went with something a little safer. I’ll have a post up about this next week!
• Stage our bedroom. We currently don’t have a bed (again, I shared on Instagram stories a while back that it fell apart on us last month) and we kind of need one of those for staging. I ordered one last week and it just came in, so that’s a step in the right direction. We’ve also got a fun collaboration planned in our bedroom that’s going to make a BIG difference – I can’t wait to get it done!

• Fix the fireplace. When we were pulling up the carpet downstairs a few years back, one of the tiles on the fireplace surround was knocked off. We have been intending to give the fireplace a makeover for a while now, so we never got around to replacing it. We were originally just going to patch the missing tile before we list the house and call it a day, but instead we’ve got a full fireplace makeover in store thanks to one of our very favorite brands (hint: they’re orange and awesome and I spend half my life in their store). Get excited.
• Clean out the guest room. I’m embarrassed to admit that up until a couple of weeks ago you literally couldn’t fully open the door to our guest room because it was such a hot mess. I’ve been slowly working on it (you may have seen some peeks on my Instagram stories…basically what I’m saying is if you don’t follow me over there you definitely should) and it’s getting there, but it still needs some work. We’re going to get it cleaned out and stage it, then call it a day.
• Replace the flooring in the guest room. Oh, except this needs to happen too. This is the one room in the house that is still carpeted, and it will literally cost us under $200 to replace it with the same flooring the rest of the house has. It’s a no-brainer.
• Give the powder room a refresh. We have a (very) small powder room downstairs that is totally untouched. We’ll replace the flooring when we do the kitchen, and we already have a leftover countertop from Jackson’s bathroom for the vanity. With a couple of other small changes, it’ll look a million times better for almost no money.
• Paint the exterior of the house. Ahh, the other biggie. We hadn’t originally planned on doing this, but our realtor said we really need to if we want the house to sell fast. The paint job was looking pretty rough when we bought the house 6 years ago, and now it’s just downright ugly. We’ve already started gathering quotes for this (this is probably the only thing on the list we won’t be doing ourselves) and hopefully will knock it out soon.
• Trim the hedges and trees. Corey and I aren’t great at yard maintenance, and we have some overgrown bushes and trees all around our property. This is a minor thing, but it needs to be done – it’ll probably be the last thing we complete, right before we list the house.
• Purge & organize the garage and workshop. We have an amazing garage and a really fantastic detached workshop, and they’re major selling points for our house! However, they’re both a bit messy and cluttered right now, so we’re going to do a thorough purging and organizing of them so they can put their best feet forward.
• Do a major house purge. And finally, the one that I’m sure is on every pre-moving checklist. Get rid of as much extra junk as we can. The reason for this one is twofold – it’s going to be a lot easier to stage and sell our house if there isn’t a lot of extra clutter floating around, and we’re also looking at losing about 500-ish square feet (plus an entire workshop) when we move, which means we’re going to have to let go of some stuff if we’re ever going to fit into the new house! I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I was thinking about doing some sort of organizing challenge with you guys, and this is what I was talking about. Anyone interested in maybe doing an e-mail challenge together so we can all keep each other on track? Let me know what you think and maybe I’ll throw something together for September!

Whew.

It’s a long list. It’s a lot of work. But, we’re really motivated to get this done, and thankfully a good deal of these projects are actually really affordable and simple – I’m hoping we can knock out all of the little stuff while we save up for the big stuff, and then we’ll be good to go. I know it’s a lot to take in at once, so I’ll try to hop onto Facebook Live at some point today and do a quick visual run-through of everything that needs to be done. Be prepared – it won’t be a pretty tour of my home, but it’s the real stuff that needs to happen, and I think we’ve all got a few ugly spots in our house that need to be taken care of, no?

You know I’ll be taking you along as we complete all of these projects – we’ve already started working on several of them, so I’ll be sure to do a regular update on our status on this list…keep your fingers crossed that we can knock it all out really quickly so we can get this show on the road!