Selling Your Home
You bought your house so selling it at some stage is inevitable, because you are not the Prime Minister of Canada who lives at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. Justin Trudeau, the current tenant will pack his bags and all the family bicycles to make room for the next guy who wins an election.
Barack Obama, the 44th U.S. President did not sell the White House. He packed his books and basketball sneakers and left it for Donald Trump. But Trump refused to leave Queen Elizabeth did not sell Buckingham Palace because George, Prince William’s son will need it one day, when he becomes king.
Selling the house begins when you buy it. There’s great excitement, especially after living in an apartment before kids started arriving. You rip off natural wood kitchen cabinets and replace them with aluminium cabinetry common in restaurants and school kitchens. Out goes the breakfast nook, in comes bar stools.
The colour scheme of your new study is black and white, two black walls and one white one. The whole family enjoyed the 2018 box office smasher Black Panther so much, you commissioned an artist to paint a Wakanda wall complete with its movie stars, in the dining room.
There are houses on the market. There are buyers and sellers. Sellers are desperate because they found new jobs in other cities or they were retrenched; kids have grown up; they are going through a divorce, whatever the reason, they must sell as soon as possible.
No rush for buyers. They call the shots. You want a million dollars for the property. They offer $750 000. Why? Many reasons, including spending money to re-model the kitchen and install natural wood cupboards similar to the ones you ripped off. They don’t like the black and white walls in the study. They don’t like the Black Panther mural. You like fried fish, so the place smells like a wharf. Buyers always have a reason for trimming the price.
It goes back to what we said initially i.e. selling the house begins when you buy it. It’s impossible, totally impossible! It means I’ll never paint anything if I’m constantly thinking about selling down the road.
Yes, you can. Paint walls white or cream white. Hang curtains with all the colours of the rainbow instead of painting rooms orange. You can also find interesting window covers if you are not a curtains’ person like mama. The Wakanda mural should be on canvass. A painting is portable and will relocate with you.
The moral of the story is: improve your new home definitely, but don’t go over the top, otherwise buyers will topple the asking price.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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