Staging

Since the day we bought our current home, almost nine years ago, we've been talking about how we wanted to move the summer before Ali and Logan started Kindergarten. We love our house, but we're growing out of it and it is not in the best school district. A new house with a fourth bedroom, a basement, and a good school district was a blessing we really wanted for our family.

So we did everything we could think of to make our home as sellable as possible: touched up paint, fixed a few cracks and dings in the walls, emptied out the closets, packed up a few boxes of things we still want but could live without for a few months and got them out of the house, put most of the toys out of sight and the few still visible only in the kids' rooms, moved some furniture around, and took down all the family pictures. I tried to make it as easy as possible for someone looking at our house to imagine it as their own. And I wanted to be sure I did everything humanly possible so that I could honestly tell the Lord I'd done all I could when I asked Him to bless us to sell our house.

Taking down the pictures was the hardest part for me. Honestly, I kind of liked making my house look perfect (if only it would have stayed that way without constant cleaning and picking toys up), but I missed our pictures. To make myself feel better about that, I decided to replace them with pictures of mine and Jason's travels. I love looking at these pictures that Jason and I took on trips by ourselves.

Stonehenge in England:

The Coliseum and some of the Forum in Rome:

Chichen Itza in Mexico:

Bath, England:

 Niagara Falls:

 An old church in Mexico:

And all of this staging we did must have helped: our house was on the market for four days, we had three showings, and then two offers! We even got more money for the house than we thought we would. But while I am glad we did everything we did to get the house ready to sell, I know that this was a wonderful gift from a Heavenly Father who loves us. I am thankful for both that fact and my knowledge of it! Now we just need to find a new house!