The Ultimate Guide to Keeping a Home Clean for Realtor Showings When You’re Busy with Kids
Guest blog by Kris at http://parentingwithkris.com/ The ultimate guide to keeping a home clean for realtor showings when you’re busy with kids can be a game-changer. Creating a plan before the chaos ensues will give you peace of mind moving forward. Major life changes are always stressful. Selling your home, buying a new one, and moving is among the most significant stressors we endure. When you add kids into the mix, those stress levels can reach new heights. For tips that will help you to keep your home clean and organized so your home sells fast and stress is minimized, read on! Reduce Your Stuff to Keep your Home Clean To minimize the amount of time you’ll spend cleaning between showings with potential buyers, declutter your home and move much of your family’s personal belongings into storage. Especially anything out-of-season, personalized, bulky, kid-themed, or pet-related. Then, hide these items discreetly or rent a portable storage unit. Keep in mind; you don’t want an eyesore in your garage or yard, so you might want to stash your stuff with a neighbor or friend. In most cases, you’ll want to remove anything from the home that makes it feel cluttered, cramped, or unorganized. Allstate points out you shouldn’t stop there—make sure that you pull personal items. Family photos, unusual artwork, theme decor, and collections are a few examples of things that will remind buyers you live in the house, and they don’t. Stage Your Kids’ Rooms To declutter the kids’ toys in your home, for instance, you might choose to invest in a few bins or baskets. These can easily be hidden under beds or moved into storage until the house sells. Keep in mind that your kids’ rooms can be the toughest to keep up. Take a few proactive measures to make things easier for them and you: ● Remove bulkier items like high chairs, dollhouses, bean bags, bikes, and sports equipment from home. ● Banish the remaining toys to the kids’ bedrooms or playroom and have a convenient place to stash them like a storage trunk. ● Keep kids’ bedrooms as gender-neutral as possible, and remove any themed decor or murals. Keep the Home in Near-Perfect Condition Next, you’ll need to deep clean your home—paying close attention to the entryway, bathrooms, kitchen, and main living areas. Then, keep the home in near-perfect condition by devoting at least 20 minutes a day to tidying up—as this will help you to prepare for any last-minute showings that may come your way. Even better, clean as you go throughout the day, and when you get late calls, you’ll be ready to roll! To ensure that your home is in excellent condition immediately before a showing or open house, create a task list that you can refer to before you head out the door. For example, your list might include the following: ● Checking for odors and minimizing them ● Taking out the trash ● Loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher ● Wiping down kitchen and bathroom countertops ● Opening curtains or blinds to let in natural light ● Turning on lights throughout the home ● Removing pets and their belongings from the home ● Securing your valuables Leave for the Weekend If multiple showings are scheduled over the weekend and/or you have an open house planned, pack up your bags on Friday evening and leave for the weekend to avoid having to clean your home repeatedly. Plan something fun but inexpensive for each day; Kiplinger suggests taking in a movie or visiting a skating rink, park, or museum. In an ideal world, your family could move out of your current home before listing it for sale—but this option isn’t feasible for everyone. As such, you may need to juggle other things like parenting and working at the same time. If you keep these tips in mind as you attempt to sell your home, however, you’ll reduce your stress levels while keeping your family happy and your home clean and clutter-free.
When Life Gives You Lemons
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. What if the lemons are rotten or too sour to make tasty lemonade? Or if you don’t have the stamina to process the instructions to create said lemonade? I entered my 40’s feeling young and vibrant, only to have the wind knocked out of my sails due to devastating life events. Follow along with the previous blogs to understand the whole story. Starting off this decade, I have a 3rd husband, seven children, a dying mother, and my 13-year-old becomes very ill. What appears to be a persistent cold turned into a sinus infection, which seems like no big deal at the time. With the strongest of antibiotics, my son continues to be ill and wakes up one morning with a swollen eye. The short end of the story is he was suffering from an epidural abscess. We stayed for two weeks in a children’s hospital while they tried to figure out what germ infiltrated his body and what the best course of action would be. It was scary. Not Enough of Me The day we were shuttled to Philadelphia, I was bringing my mom home from a month-long hospital stay. She was still battling many cancers, and this time culminated in her having her spleen removed. It was a very long month of ups and downs in her health. I honestly didn’t know if she would ever come home again. Keep in mind, I am an only child, and she is a widow X2. It was challenging to find someone to care for a very sick mom at home when I abruptly had to leave her and be by my sons’ bedside in Philly. My other children were also in need of supervision and feeling the stress of my absence. Primarily, they were caring for each other. My youngest was 20 months and still breastfeeding, so this wasn’t very easy. The oldest had already moved out, so it left my 17- & 16-year old to care for the 11, 4- & 20-month baby. The teens were homeschooling, so it didn’t affect their missing presence in a classroom. It was easy enough to catch up on studies once the order returned to our home. My husband went back and forth and brought the kids occasionally to stay with us at the Ronald McDonald House when possible. Thank God for the mom tribe I had established over the years. Friends that would drop everything to help out whenever available. They pitched in, brought meals, and shuttled kids when necessary. Are You Kidding? More Lemons While at my mother’s bedside and days before the trip in an ambulance with my very sick son, my oldest daughter informed me that she was tying the knot AND converting her religion-to Mormonism. She wasn’t announcing the wedding for next week, month, or year, she was getting hitched in a few days. I was dumbfounded as they had been together for only a few months, so I assume she is pregnant but later discovers she is not. I explain that I cannot be there and wish she would wait for a better time as well as honestly reconsider her religious choice. As any adult-ish child would do, she cannot hear me and proceeds to do what she set out to do, without any of her family in attendance. I had a hard time processing who came first in the pecking order of chaotic necessity. It was hard to make lemonade out of this series of events. I decided to be there for my son and mother while wishing my daughter well, from a distance. Staying in the Ronald McDonald house and praying, my son and mom will be ok was all I could handle at this time. Facetime wasn’t a thing in 2008, so any communication with my children or mother was via phone. I kept up with the goings-on back home as much as humanly possible, but it seemed everyone was going off the deep end. I was learning things that could’ve broken me to the core, including that my oldest was newly pregnant (unbeknownst to her at the wedding time). No Freaking Way; Can’t Make Lemonade My son spent his 14th birthday in St. Christopher’s Children’s Hospital and eventually came home with a PICC line and nurse visits throughout the summer. He continued to have sinus infections and later needed more surgery, but overall did recover well. In the fall that same year, that same son, the extreme sports kid, decided to jump off a trampoline with a snowboard on his feet into a pile of leaves, while my 5-year-old watched. I’m sure I don’t need to paint much of a picture of the outcome. Two broken elbows, a stay in the local hospital, and a chance for another surgery. I should’ve played the lottery that year! My gray hairs quadrupled, andI’m still in awe that I didn’t jump off a cliff. That same summer (3 months after their wedding), my newly pregnant oldest daughter and her new Mormon husband came on a camping trip with us, so we could get to know the new son in law. It was clear to me that the relationship was abusive, almost instantly. After a heart to heart with my pregnant offspring, she left him. While displacing a few kids to fit my oldest back home, her siblings create a room for their sister and nephew-to-be. Being a single mom wasn’t a terrible thing with a family like ours. None of us would let her and the baby suffer. Incidentally, the father of my first grandchild has never seen, cared for in any way, or inquired about his child. Maybe listening to your parents has some merit! Losing a Parent is Like Nothing Else Entering my 40’s caring for a very sick mother and many children under 20 was another hell to go through. We all know our parents are going to die someday, but it always seems so far off. There is little thought
