It’s time for us to get our house ready to list. As much as I hate moving, the reality is that we need a house in which all of the Heathens can have their own rooms. The clutter of two boys in one room, sharing one small closet is threatening to overtake my house and my sanity. And did I mention that those Heathen rooms need to be far, far away from the master bedroom? They also need their own bathroom, lest I have a mental breakdown in the very near future from 3 guys sharing one bathroom.

Anyway, as an HGTV junkie, I know that to maximize our chances of a quick sale, our house needs to be “show ready,” which means that we need to de-clutter, de-personalize and stage rooms as best we can while still living the day-to-day here. I’ve made a list of projects, and this weekend, we tackled the bedroom closets. Here’s the before of what was our book closet. It’s got plenty of shelves, but it’s not deep at all:

Pretty bad, right? Since not everyone is a crazy-book person, I know that most people would see this as a linen closet, so that’s how I needed to stage it. I spent hours packing up the books for storage (the shelves actually go two more feet to the right on the inside of the closet so there were a LOT of books in there). I put everything in boxes for storage, and here is the final result:

So now, potential buyers can see the space but still envision a use for the closet (rather than just looking at a completely empty space).

As for the master closet, I am way too embarrassed to post the before pic, but let’s just say it was pretty messy. The idea of “walk-in” was a misnomer, because with all the shoes and baskets of craft stuff on the floor, as well as clothes packed in way too tightly, it was a hot mess to say the least. I packed all my craft stuff for storage, packed about 1/3 of the clothes and gave a bunch more to Goodwill. Here’s where we ended:

My husband also spent time weeding flower beds and scraping and re-painting sections of our front doors that has started to show peeling paint. I think we still have a couple of more weeks of work to go (since most is accomplished on the weekends), but I’m determined to have the house looking its best. It really is a great house, but yeah…for the good of my sanity and world peace, those kids need separate bedrooms…like yesterday.