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My client Alice, a professional gardener, artist, carpenter, and all-around super woman, I am not sure what this woman cannot do, had created, over the past 20 years, an incredible urban sanctuary in southeast Seattle.
She decided to sell her house during the pandemic for a couple of reasons, for several years Alice’s mother had been living in the main house as well as a couple of roommates and Alice lived in an amazing Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit (DADU) that she had created. But when Covid 19, hit her mother moved to Whidbey Island, somewhat reluctantly, but Alice just felt it was safer for her as she could live with one of her brothers in a more isolated way.
Alice was already feeling like the house and property were getting too much for her to manage and with her mother gone and the prospect of having to get more roommates at a time when it felt unsafe. She decided it was time to sell, we had a couple of false starts, but Alice finally decided she really wanted to get out of Seattle and move to a more rural place.
So, we started to make preparations. As you can imagine, Alice had a lot of stuff to go through after twenty years, plus lots of things that her mother, who had spent a lot of time teaching overseas, had left. Being the industrious woman that she is, she held several yard sales and was able to sell a lot of furniture, antiques, and general merchandise.
As is often the case it took a little longer to get the house on the market, partly because there was a last-minute decision to remove the carpet in the living room and hallway and replace it with a wood-like luxury vinyl flooring and it looked great.
I recommended that we stage the house with a stager I knew, who would be a perfect fit for this artsy and charming 1920’s home. I always choose a stager that will work with a type of house I am selling as there is no one-size-fits-all and it makes a huge difference. There are so many cookie-cutter type stagers with fake lemons in bowls, super cheap furniture, and tacky décor!
Alice had been living in a separate detached, super cool one-bedroom cottage, and planned to stay there until the house closed, so my stager was able to rearrange the place with Alice’s furniture to make it look more appealing.
Alice did not understand why staging was so important, but by the time it was all done, she realized how crucial it was, as the house looked gorgeous and it certainly hugely affected the sales price.
Her house had ten offers and escalated way over $100,000 with all contingencies waived and a big non-refundable earnest money deposit.
I was so happy for Alice as she had certainly poured her heart and soul into her property and now, she will have the proceeds to go and create another masterpiece from scratch this time. She plans to buy land and build a house on it.
You go, Alice!
