Wow. It's a lot of work to get a house ready for sale.

We are getting really close. Our open house is this weekend, Friday is a "Broker Day" where we expect around 150 realtors to fly through our house while we are not there. We are tasked with creating a compelling space full of light, flowers, fresh air and music.

Shawn has been taking pictures, and I'll have to grab a few out of our home computer to post up here. She has posted several pictures from the middle of the interior painting process.

There were three main parts to getting the house ready: Shoveling out, Outside and Inside.

Shoveling out: The process of taking most of our stuff out of the house to make room. This enhances the value of the house because people can see the walls and floor so they think that they can fit all their stuff into the house. In order to accomplish this, we rented a 10'x10'x32' storage locker. It's pretty much full now. We could fit more into it, but we decided not to spend 1% of our sale price to have someone else "stage" our house with foo-foo stuff. Instead, we are keeping the best of our stuff in the house and trying to make the furniture look small (remove leaves from table) and the rooms look big (lots of wall and floor space).

Outside: Let me remind you that we have two boys and a Labrador. One of them (you guess which) has made a habit of doing damage to various plants, fences, brick patios, etc. within the yard. We also took down our play structure which left the lawn a mess. So, we painted the outside and replanted a lot of the otherwise fallow planting beds.

Inside: The ColorTile debacle happened before I started blogging, but in short, we hired them to install flooring and they went bankrupt during the installation and we had to find other means of getting the rest of the house done. We painted, finished trim items, hauled stuff away to storage. Moving in the summer time is cheaper because you can rent stake-side trucks rather than enclosed ones.

Meanwhile, the boys got an extra week of summer because the while the schools in Palo Alto started on 24-Aug, the one in Bonny Doon didn't start until 30-Aug. Now they are in school and Shawn is doing the reverse commute this week.

Now we just have the laundry room and the garage to get ready for people to look at.