Sunday, May 13, 2012

Birthday Weekend & House Update

Our “On again, Off again” potential buyer is currently off again, so we sent one more email off to his realtor, and now we’re moving on to “Plan B”.  We’ve selected a new Realtor to list our home, and he has lots of plans for effectively staging the house for a quick sale at a higher price.

Step 1 was to remove the carpet from our stairs. 

stairs without carpet

When we built the house, we went with solid oak treads, although we covered them with a runner made from our living room carpet.  So, while Nick and I were out on Saturday, Tom & Bryce got started with ripping off the carpet.  We weren’t sure what they we going to look like – they had been under carpet for almost 15 years – but we were surprised to see that they didn’t look too bad!

Tom and Bryce got all of the staples pulled out, smoothed them out with steel wool, and wiped the down with lemon oil.

Tom and Bryce at work

The finished product looked pretty good!  We just need to be careful when going up or down in socks! LOL!

finished stairs

Meanwhile, Nicolas and I got home from his Driver’s Ed class, and I got started making the birthday cake for today’s dinner.

birthday cake

birthday cake_2

Today we celebrated Mother’s Day and Tom’s and my birthdays.  We met for an early dinner at Paesano’s in Ann Arbor, and then back to our house for coffee, cake & ice cream.

Mom opened her Mother’s Day presents, and was really excited about her new Tiger’s jersey!  Who’s your Tiger, Mom??!!

Mom's Tigers jersey

Birthday couple

Tom and I enjoyed our birthday celebration, and are looking forward to another great year!

6 comments:

  1. Happy Birthday folks! Hopefully this new realitor will be just the right ticket to your freedom of selling the house. We'll keep you in our prayers. Be Safe and Enjoy!

    It's about time.

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  2. What a fun celebration--- birthdays AND Mother's Day! Your mom looks soooo excited about that jersey too. Too cute.

    We once tore off some older carpeting in a house we had, and underneath was the nicest hardwood flooring! Here we had lived for 10 years with that ugly carpeting, when we could have enjoyed that gleaming lovely woodwork. LOL

    ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
    Karen and Steve
    (Our Blog) RVing: Small House... BIG Backyard
    http://kareninthewoods-kareninthewoods.blogspot.com

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  3. Happy Birthday to you both! It is near the time for us to place the "For Sale" sign out front at our house also. Keep us posted on what helps with your sale......


    Don and Cheryl

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    1. For the longest time, Cheryl, we've been resisting making any major changes to the way "we" like the house . . . obviously that hasn't worked, so we're going to try it "their" way now . . . today I'm stripping wallpaper off the walls in my mudroom! We're going to let this realtor re-decorate the major rooms in our home to what he thinks they should look like. Luckily, he's got quite an eye, and he's able to get "props" - furniture and artwork for us to use, very inexpensively. We'll see how it goes!

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  4. Happy Birthday to you both and nice to see you also enjoyed Mothers day with your Mom. Hope all goes well with the new Realtor and the house sells fast. Sounds like he has some good ideas to market it.

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  5. Happy Birthdays and Mother's day to you all!!...looks like it was a fun day!!..

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