September house update (updated)

Well, I had the real estate agent come by to look at the house and got a whole new list of things I need to do. I thought I was done or almost done. At least I can see the light at the end of the tunnel....she made some good suggestions and it will end up costing me another $1,500 or so.

The big ticket thing was new carpet in the two smaller upstairs bedrooms. I thought that I could do it for under $800 but it will run about $1,100 and for another $50 Eric, my carpet installer, will fix the crackley hardwood floor in the hallway....he thinks he knows what is wrong. It will take a couple weeks for the carpet to arrive.

So, in the meantime, I'm trimming trees, cleaning up the yard a little, washing windows and replacing blinds. I need to clean the deck and paint the utility room. The wood stove needs new flue pipe and a chimney cap. De-cluttering and packing up personal stuff is a big job.

Then I'll need some cleaners to come through in case I miss something.

I'm starting to get burned out on this house stuff and I have a whole other house I have to build in the future. I need to get away from it for a while. I'll have a week at the Lake of the Ozarks in mid October and a short trip to St. Louis the end of September....that might help.

Update of the Update...Sept. 18

Heard from Eric -- he can't install the carpet until October 9th which is after I wanted to have the house listed...but that is the best he can do and I want him to do the job.

I rented a chain saw and spent half a day cutting lower limbs off of my cedar trees so that you can walk under them to cut the grass. I don't mind them being low u other people wouldn't like it. I cut a few limbs from around the swing set so I can rehabilitate that area a little. I found out that one of the main trunks of the large maple tree is dead so I got that out as well. I only took out the bare limbs from the hickory tree where I already removed the branches. I think it looks a lot better and I didn't cut too much so the privacy is preserved.

I loaded up the truck with a bunch of limbs and took them over to the city's dump site. I have made probably 8 or 9 trips there this summer but this time they wanted to know if I was a city resident....and I'm not...so they charged me $27 or the two loads that I dropped off....$54 total...but I'm not too upset because I really loaded the 2nd truck-full and got just about everything hauled away. I also cut the larger limbs for stove wood so that will be useful in the winter.

While I was cutting the limbs, Ty, my real estate agent, stopped by. She had visited the house up the street that is for sale and wanted to talk about comparisons of my house to it. She thinks my house is really as good or even better in some ways but she says that the price they are asking is not realistic. Francis's house, up the other way, has been for sale for some time and is tied up in a contingency contract. My house is much better than his in terms of updates and layout and I think I should expect to do better than his. So maybe I'm somewhere in the middle ---which would probably be okay for the most part. Ty doesn't want to know what my bottom line is but it is higher than the number she was thinking about. Most of what she said was very positive and I think that seeing the other house and then seeing mine again made a better impression than her first visit. I think we will try to have a sign in the yard by October 1st even though the carpet won't be in yet.