Crawling & Selling a House

If you've never had to put your house on the market, you are LUCKY! We are in our 2nd month of having our town home FOR SALE and it hasn't been easy. To give your home the best chance of selling, it has to look like a model home. In case you didn't know...babies don't live in model homes. So the dilemma for us has been trying to live in our house, with our 10 month old little girl, and keep it "model home clean" all of the time. (You never know when a realtor will request to show your house and some of the less organized ones only give you 15 minutes of prep time before they expect to show their clients around.)
If you're in the market to buy a home, you may or may not know what goes into the preparation to make those perfect online pictures PERFECT! We now have tons of respect for people who obviously take a lot of time and care in staging and cleaning their homes (we too are looking for a new, larger house).
We've learned a few things and now believe to be fairly savvy sellers and buyers at the same time. Here are a few tips:

• Take down all personal photos of your family and especially your baby :( Sad, I know, and I don't like living in a house without pictures, but honestly most buyers cannot see themselves living in your house if they see pictures of you everywhere.
• Take away/hide as many toys and baby items as you can, and the ones that you leave in the house should be organized and in one room. We have a portion of our bonus room designated as a play room, and put the big toys in our cars during a home showing.
• De-baby proof your house for a showing/Open House. Again, people will be distracted by your lifestyle (parents!) and you would rather have buyers looking at your beautiful wood floors or upgraded fixtures....not outlet plugs and baby gates.
• De-clutter as much as possible, which will actually benefit you because you'll have less to dust and clean around. Since our baby is now crawling and pulling herself up on everything, it's helpful not to have so many decorations and trinkets on display. That's one less thing for her to break or end up on the floor.

So the selling continues, and so far the only upside is that our house is clean and organized 90% of the time. Not the way I want to live my whole life, but it works for now, and hopefully we'll get an offer SOON...