HOW TO SELL A HOUSE

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It’s been nearly 20 years since we moved into our first house, and as we’ve grown from the two of us and two huskies, up to the two of us and three little people people sharing the space, you can probably imagine that the place is a bit of a squash and a squeeze, especially as the three little people are becoming bigger people day by day. So, finally, we are moving house this year. I’m filled with equal amounts of excitement and terror at what’s ahead of us. Since the last time we did this was 20 years ago, and the ONLY time we did this, when we had no property we needed to sell and all we needed to do was worry about buying one, we’re quite like a bunch of headless chickens, except these two particular headless chooks are sat on the sofa, scouring the internet for information and becoming none the wiser. We have no idea how to sell a house.

Mortgages are Confusing

Mortgages are confusing. Type into Google anything to do with mortgages and how to sell a house and you’re hit with sites asking you for this that and the other before they’ll impart with the vaguest of information. At the moment we aren’t looking for anything concrete, we don’t want banks and building societies trying to get us to commit, we just want a general idea of what we could afford and how likely were are to be able to borrow it.

It felt more than a little more than luck – and that’s something we haven’t had much of in the past year or so – when I found MortgageCalculators.info. but when I first looked I was all excited until I saw the dollar sign, but they have a UK Mortgage Calculator site now too, and I have spent *so* long tinkering about on there.

It explains mortgages in detail, including the different types available, assistance that might be available such as the government’s Help to Buy scheme, and looks at the practical side of buying a house – including stamp duty and insurance. Most importantly it has calculators [as the name suggests] and that’s where I’ve been spending most of my time. I like being able to freely go backwards and forwards inputting different figures and seeing what happens. The UK calculator on the site determines the monthly payments on a mortgage loan for a fixed-rate loan along with interest-only payments, which is easy to understand as a jumping off point if you’re a first time buyer. Our current mortgage is a repayment mortgage which means we pay off a portion of the interest and capital each month, but we’ll see what’s on offer when it comes to our time.

Where to Move

We’re trying to stay local to the schools we’re at because of the boys’ friendship groups but naturally when we bought our house we managed to buy a house in the most ridiculously expensive place in the county it seems and so house prices are high and property availability is low. I’ve been stalking Onthemarket for about a month now every day in case something pops up that I like. Funnily enough I spend most of my time looking at the floor plans now I’m actually thinking about moving, as opposed to the interior photos which is what I looked at most of the time when it was just a pipe dream. And speaking of pipes…

Fixing Up The House To Sell

We’re hiring a plumber at the moment to install a new bathroom before we sell. Current advice on how to sell a house seems to be *not* to do this – and I realise after looking at about 100 houses online that I actually don’t care about the colour or shape or whatever of the bathrooms I’ve seen – but honestly, our bathroom is a shambles and no one, unless they were about to gut the house, is going to come near it without a new bathroom and so a new bathroom it is, before we put it on the market. Once that’s in we’ll be inviting the estate agents to come and advise if there’s anything else we should be doing before we sell it to get the maximum price we can for it.

So, that’s what we’re going to be up to over the next few months. If you’ve got any tips for us on selling our house or buying a new one, we’d love to hear them – and you can follow our journey as we go over on our Keep Up With The Jones Family Instagram.