Designed to sell

A few weeks back, Chel and I got to thinking that we should go ahead and speed up the Big Master Plan we had for our lives — which involved waiting until after I finished law school to move to a bigger house by a lake and start a family. There’s no time like the present, we figure.

So disregarding all that negative press about the worst housing market in generations, we’re preparing to put our house on the market. The other day, we invited a couple of rockstar real estate agents, Kathy and Steve, over to our house to tell us what they thought we could list it for.

Kathy and Steve are the Real Estate Mafia of North Oak Cliff. Almost every “for sale” sign in our neighborhood has their pictures on it. The first thing Kathy told us when she walked through our front door is that she’s sold our house before. Twice. She once lived next door. And she was very concerned about our neighbor Virginia when she saw that we had erected a massive wood fence between our yards.

Kathy and Steve proceeded room by room through our home, taking notes. “This shows nicely.” “Fix this.” “Paint that.” Room by room of minor little stuff that could make a big difference.

“I feel like I’m on Designed to Sell,” I told them. “Except you’re not about to come back with a crew to do all this work for us, are you?”

“Nope!”

So we’re slowly but surely working through Kathy and Steve’s little list. Although all this stuff takes longer than HGTV would lead you to believe, in a week or two we’ll put our home out there in the hope of moving our Big Master Plan ahead.