Hello Friends!
Gamera, some cool pics there! About the weather, we had one night of -7 here! When the cold front hit, the temps dropped over 40 degrees in a matter of ours! Talk about a shock to the system.
And bit of an update: today was a very long and emotional day. A friend and his wife came over to the house to help. Chuck (the friend) and I loaded everything I could find in the house that was metal and headed off to the scrap dealer. Made about 40 bucks off 2 trips. Didn't seem like a lot, but it was getting more out of the way. In the meantime, Dawn began packing up some of the figures of angels and stuff and then found somebody who wanted the Angels. She also went through Mom's room and sorted out a lot of stuff, taking items off to donate and also taking much of the sewing, yarn and stuff like that off herself. (I said to take what she could use) . It was hard to even watch and I found myself so distraught, I was nearly shutting down. I just wanted to crawl away and hide somewhere.
I was shortly after that, when an agent arrived that I had set up a meeting with. He saw the state I was in and offered to come another time. I said no, let's do this. We toured the house, and then we talked. He presented me with this booklet, showing all the information he had about the property. It has all kinds of charts, graphs and so on showing sales trends, maps etc. showing what areas homes were selling and so on. Very impressive. His target he came up with was around $219K to 249K. Probably closer to the lower number once he saw the older appliances ans so forth.
His first advice: put down the paint brush and step away from it! Anyone in the market for this sort of home is most likely going to redo carpeting and paint themselves, and very likely a home someone would want to remodel. Anything I do is not going to add any value what-so-ever. I liked the sound of that!
His advise it to empty the house, remove anything personal, such as curtains, etc. and do basic cleaning, and not to even get to carried away with that!. Anything more is simply a waste of time and money!
He also said if I want to move faster, there is the option of bringing in an investor, who could put cash in my hand in a week or so. The downside: probably in the range of around $175k.
He seems very professional and comes to me through a circle of friends, some of whom I have known for 30+ years.
Much to think about.
Jim