We’re fessing up to an extremely poorly timed project that made our house look WORSE right before it hit the market. Whoops. Plus we share the smorgasbord of ways we’re selling our houses. All three are being sold differently (including some with and some without the help of a real estate agent). So we’re breaking down how and why we chose each route, including why we paid to have a “pre-inspection” done for our Richmond home and how that changed our preparations for listing the house. Plus Sherry talks about an unconventional (and completely accidental) way she decluttered her digital life.

You can also find this episode on your favorite podcast listening app, like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Continue reading #165: The Dumb Thing We Did Before Listing Our House at Young House Love.

We’ve gotten hundreds of questions about the financial side of running an Airbnb or other short term vacation rental. Specifically: “can you detail the expenses and fees that take a bite out of the profit? Are there hidden costs? How exactly do rental taxes work? Insurance?! ACK!“

Whether the person asking us was considering doing one themselves, or just plain curious (talking about money = interested face emoji), we’re laying it all out in the hope that it demystifies it a little bit, and is helpful to anyone who might be on the fence about whether or not this is a viable side hustle. We actually really enjoyed learning the ins & outs of this stuff – so it’s fun to share what we learned.

Obviously there are expenses like actually purchasing, renovating, and furnishing a home that you’ll be using as a vacation rental.

Continue reading The Costs Of Running A Vacation Rental (With Real Numbers) at Young House Love.

How should I stage my house to sell? Should I take down all of my family photos? I’m not selling but I want my house to look good for company- give me some tips! Do I need to add a lot of decorative accessories? Or, wait am I supposed to be taking things away and decluttering?! 

These sentences (and about 642 more) have all been slung at me every time I mentioned that I’ve been working on the side as a home stager for a local realtor for over a year. If you haven’t heard about that you can catch up – and get a few bonus stories and tips – by listening to podcast Episode #53, Episode 41, and Episode 88. But in this extra-beefy post (gah, it’s almost 5,000 words!) I’ll cover why I love staging, my favorite money-saving tricks, and I’ll share some before & afters of a few of the homes I’ve helped get ready for sale.

Continue reading Staging Tips For Selling (Or Just Simplifying!) Your House at Young House Love.

If you guys follow us on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve already heard the news: not only does the beach house officially have furniture (!!!) we finally got the spend the night there this past weekend! Two nights, in fact!

It’s still a far cry from “done.” There’s a lot of remaining furniture that we need to get (nightstands, dressers, headboards, a top for our coffee table, etc) along with various other decor stuff that’s missing (rugs! art! lamps!). Not to mention some bigger tasks like installing the kitchen, adding built-in bunk beds upstairs, and constructing bench seating in the breakfast nook. But even so, just having some furniture (a couch! beds to sleep on!) and flushing toilets & working showers feels like a HUGE MILESTONE in this year-long renovation. Especially when you consider how things looked last October when we bought it:

We spent a couple of days there this weekend unpacking, arranging, and making lists of what we still need to move and/or shop for, and I stole a few minutes on our way out to make a big ol’ video tour of our progress.

Continue reading The Beach House Has Furniture! at Young House Love.

As exciting as it has been to move into this new house, it was certainly sad to say goodbye to our old house and leave behind all of the parts (and projects!) that we couldn’t take with us. The penny tile backsplash. The deck. The fireplace. Wait, scratch that last one.

Let’s zoom in a bit closer on that little item sitting on the mantel. Well, what do we have here?

That, my friends, is an amazing miniature replica of our fireplace. Miniature as in completely portable and yes-it-totally-came-with-us-to-the-new-house. It’s the creation of Lisa Harrold, a recent fine arts graduate in the UK who specializes in miniatures. She emailed us to say that as a fun exercise to keep her skills fresh, she decided to recreate our fireplace – only smaller. Much smaller.

Since it wasn’t of much use to her after it was done, she asked if she could send it to us as a housewarming gift, and once we convinced her to let us pay her for it and the shipping, it immediately became one of our favorite accessories in our new house.

Continue reading You Can’t Take It With You… Or Can You? at Young House Love.

Since we shared our house wish list back in the fall of 2010, we wanted to document what was on the list now (I just found it scrunched up in a vase that was sitting on the bedroom floor, naturally). It’s actually the same list  – we just scribbled things out as they changed and added new things as time passed (even when we weren’t house hunting, if we thought of something for our “someday house” we jotted it down whenever we came across the list). Not surprisingly, many things were the same – although it does seem that after 7 years of home-ownership our nice-to-have list grew a lot (I guess since we keep realizing new things we’d appreciate but don’t necessarily need).

Must Haves:

• Four bedrooms (or three bedrooms and an office) of which at least three are on one floor
• At least two full bathrooms and no more than three (three full ones occasionally felt like one too many tubs/showers to clean, so we were open to scaling back down to 2 or 2.5)
• Within our budget (duh)

• A private street with less through traffic (we wanted a place that Clara could ride her scooter and someday learn to ride a bike)
• Around the same square footage as our last house, since that worked well for us (give or take 100 square feet or so – but nothing significantly larger or smaller)
• Something not new (we just love a home with character and eons of potential behind all of those dated decorating decisions of yore)
• Great schools (Clara’s the most important thing in the end, so it didn’t matter how awesome a house was if it wasn’t in a good school district)
• Located in a walkable neighborhood (our long evening walks keep us happy and sane, so couldn’t live on a road where walking is dangerous)

• A flat-ish backyard without a big treacherous drop off (this is another Clara & Burger safety parameter)
• A safe and well loved neighborhood (the reasoning behind the word “safe” is obvious, and the “well loved” thing just means that even if our house needs help we’d love to be on a block with other homes that have already been spruced up, so we don’t risk over-improving our house for a crumbling-around-us neighborhood).

Continue reading The Thrill Of The Hunt at Young House Love.

We love being able to look back at the empty photos of our first house, because while they’re definitely bittersweet, it’s so much fun to reminisce. They’re a great reminder that a house is only a house, and it’s the moments that you’ve shared with the people (and the chihuahuas) that you love that really make it a home. So we wasted no time snapping empty photos of our second house. And although I thought “without furniture all these rooms will pretty much look the same” the funny thing is that none of them do. So it’s nice to know that we left our mark on this sweet home of ours.

Here’s the dining room/office before:

And here’s the empty after.

Here’s the office all empty (wish I had a before picture from this angle).

Here’s the frame hallway all cleared out.

Continue reading Empty at Young House Love.

Back when we were house hunting in 2010 we shared a series of posts that each profiled a different house that we looked at (you can see them here, here, here, here, and here). And even though our hunt is over this time around, we wanted to revisit 9 other houses that we casually toured (many of them just on Open House days) before we met The One. So we had fun driving around snapping pictures for you and reminiscing (“That was the one with the phone in the bathroom!” “That was the one with the family of deer in the backyard!”).

The Lake House: The first house was very modest in size and located just a few blocks away from our current house. So although it wasn’t in our dream neighborhood… dude, it was on a lake! But we learned that even with heavy renovations, it would be extremely expensive to add a bathroom on the lower level where half of the square footage was, and the extra-low ceilings down there were also a non-changeable feature (there was no way to make them any higher).

Continue reading Other Houses We Looked At Before Buying Our New One at Young House Love.