Ben Ruset Sysadmin, etc.

Selling a House Sucks

I suppose this will be the first "real" blog entry.

I'm selling my house. I've been in this ~1200 sq. ft. ranch in Brick, NJ since I closed on my birthday, January 25, 2001. I've done a moderate amount of work to it, but the entire time I've owned it I haven't wanted to put too much effort into a plain and (in my opinion) boring ranch. Here's a rundown of what I have done:

• Replaced most of the carpet with laminate. I love hardwood floors but I just couldn't afford to install them here. And again, why invest the money into a ranch? I got a great deal on a Pergo clone at BJ's and have done most of the house - with the exception of the master bedroom - in it. It's worn quite well, although in some areas it has started to pull apart. I think I can fix those relatively quickly with a few taps of the hammer.
• Removed "old lady" wallpaper. When I moved in, there was this godawful white with silver thread wall paper in the old living room (which has since become my dining room.) I painted the two opposite walls grey, and left the other opposite walls and the hallway the original white.
• Installed wainscotting in the dining room and hallway. The walls here aren't that great, and when we got our small dog Zoe she made fast work of a lot of the lower surfaces of the walls. I put birch plywood wainscot panels up, and put some trim up. That sat for about a year, and now (June '07) I am re-doing some of the trim - now that I have a nice compound mitre saw and can cut angles - and may paint all of the trim and panels high gloss white.
• Turned the 2nd bedroom into a nursery. We obviously needed a place to keep our baby when not in use. I ripped out the brown shag carpet, put more matching laminate down, and painted the walls a pale pink, and repainted all of the trim white.
• Installed a new kitchen. The old cabinets, while sturdy, were dated. The weird looking old lady white countertop had to go. I spent about $7000 in new cabinets and countertop at Home Depot. We also added a dishwasher and a new sink and hardware. Recently I put up a plastic copper tin-panel backsplash. It's really done wonders for the house. Plus having a dishwasher is very convenient.
• Paver Walkway. I made the mistake of hiring a "mason" off of Craigslist to install a paver walkway. I'm not really impressed with the results, but it does save the lawn from some foot traffic. Not that the lawn is anything great to look at.

We put the house on the market for $285,000. We haven't had any bites on it yet. This could be due to our real estate agent virtually disappearing, or due to our house being too expensive. I'm going to lower the house in the next week or so. Maybe we'll get some bites at $270k? Either way, we may fire our agent and go with a new one. Here's a hint - don't hire a friend to sell your house.

Friday, after work, we're going to look at a old colonial house in New Egypt. We're going to see how long it takes to get there from here (and thus see how far Laura will have to drive to get to the gym). The commute to Manhattan should be the same, or a little bit better. The house needs a lot of work (new roof, possibly new heating system, closing up an underground oil tank, etc.) but if we can get it cheap, we'll have a lot of money to invest into the house to restore it. And when we're done, the house will be worth a lot of money.