You’ve probably tried everything already, but in case you haven’t tried magnesium, it works for both me and my daughter. I started it to relieve muscle cramping, and found that it also worked for sleeping all night long.
If you don’t mind being psychoanalysed by a stranger, from reading your posts I’m getting a sense that part of you doesn’t want to do this at all, and some of the reason is a subconscious desire to sabotage the whole thing.
No offence is meant, and I am probably wrong. But as someone who hates change myself, I have wondered.
Not really true. No, I really don’t want to do this, but I understand the necessity. To that end, I’m doing a very large number of uncomfortable things to help get the house prepped. It’s just that I have a long emotional attachment to those couches and while I have dutifully followed a lot of uncomfortable advice, dumping those two couches was finally just a bridge too far.
I fear that I may have aliened my two closest allies. The agent looked disappointed as if I didn’t have faith in her – which isn’t true at all – and I’m likely to get a lot more flak from the ex. And while I joke about being bossed around by two strong-willed women, there is a point at which I do have a right to make my own decisions, even if just based on emotion and with less than ideal consequences.
Fair enough!
You might find that you actually prefer the new couch once you sit on it…
Maybe put the couches you like in storage, arrange TEMPORARY new ones for staging, then use YOURS in your new place?
Or I might find that I don’t. And then what?
I admit that the couch is gorgeous and would add appeal for prospective buyers. But it may not be practical even for the current family room, let alone a small-ish apartment. It actually consists of three pieces. Two of them hook together to form a couch that is significantly longer than my current long one. The third one hooks on at right angles to one end (only). This is not a sectional in the usual meaning – the third piece is a thing commonly called a chaise lounge, a big square backless piece like a gigantic ottoman.
I saw it as potentially interfering with access to the coffee table currently accessible from both my old long and short couches, and possibly even blocking part of the TV, and certainly if someone had their feet propped up on it. The whole thing is an idea that exudes luxury, but IMHO requires lots of space to really pull it off.
I thought of that. There are also some bookshelves and heavy boxes of books that could be so relegated. The problem is that Large Burly Men are required to move such items to storage and back again, and Large Burly Men don’t come cheap, and neither are storage charges cheap. Plus all the aforementioned other problems.
Storage in the garage was another possibility as I normally don’t park in it very much in summer, but it all seemed to be getting very complicated as opposed to just doing nothing except painting and a new area rug and the bazillions of other staging things. There are so many more things going on right now.
I imagine it has to be uncomfortable to be trying to sell a house but you still live there.
If you’re trying to stage it and get new furniture and sell the house, then what? Is the furniture part of the sale? Are you stuck with furniture you don’t want?
The great thing about this agent is that she’s providing a lot of the furniture for staging. She apparently has practically a warehouse full of stuff. Which is why I feel particularly bad about turning down her couch offer that she was so enthusiastic about. The rest of her contributions will be smaller things like chairs in the front room, a dinette set in the kitchen breakfast nook, artwork, drapes – stuff like that.
Chaise longue. Sorry.
It sure is. But the optimal sales outcome comes when you can make it look like you don’t live there. The resident(s) sanitized and refreshed the place end to end to start their shiny new life in their newly shined house, and then somehow died never to occupy it. That’s the look the buyers want to see.
Everything you do less than that costs serious money. Far more money that a short term rental for a place to hide 2 couches.
IMO/IME
The hardest part is you’re emotionally moving twice: once into a totally unfamiliar surrounding and stuff in your existing house, then a second move into wherever you’re actually going. With some mix of new and old stuff going into the new place with you.
And the whole time you’re in the staged house, you’re walking or sitting on eggshells to not make a mess, leave any clutter, damage anything, etc. Bed is made, bathroom is clean, kitchen looks immaculate, etc. All day every day for weeks or months. It’s hard work.
I’m getting fed up with Facebook. It seems like half the posts I get are ads, mostly for drugs but also for other things that are totally irrelevant to anything I’m interested in. FBP doesn’t seem to be able to stop them, unless there’s some setting that I’m missing. I’ve tried requesting FB to hide these ads, but it’s not helping.
“Chaise longue” is the original French, but is frequently rendered in English as “chaise lounge”. It may have evolved as a misspelling of the original, but is used that way very often.
“Borrowing from another language and changing it” is how many (or most) words or terms enter a language in the first place.
Although there’s a special sort of butchery where you take a two-word phrase from some language and then shred one word but not the other.
I’ve heard “chaise lounge” rationalized as the fact that chaise longue, which means literally “long chair”, is a chair that you can stretch out and relax in, and so “lounge” makes a kind of semantic sense. Indeed, Google Translate renders chaise longue as “lounge chair”. The mix of French and English in the same two-word phrase is a bit odd, for sure, but no one ever said English has to make sense!
Huh, the UK Ikea page, by contrast:
This is always true, but the extent to which it’s true depends on the specific buyer, the specific property, the general area, and the balance of supply and demand. For instance, in the urban area where I used to live, unless the house was a new mansion-like infill, the land would be worth far more than the original house sitting on it, even if it’s been substantially renovated, so you could get away with some imperfections that you otherwise might not.
A new-ish suburban house is less forgiving, but cleanliness, lack of clutter, and everything working is primary. A fresh coat of bright off-white paint throughout the downstairs is genuinely important, and that’s going ahead.
However, after a few days of agonizing, I’ve changed my mind about the couch the real estate agent was offering, after looking more closely at how badly my old couches have aged. She’s in the middle of some family stuff right now but if she still has it – and I’m pretty sure she does – I sent her an email saying it’s a go for whenever she can arrange it.
The AI-generated pictures of my family room with that couch, and the dining and front rooms with her various accessories, were gorgeous! It will definitely be used for staging, and unless I have some big problem with it, I’ll buy it from her for about one-fifth of its original cost when I move. My old couches are going to the dump. My agent bought this from some rich woman who, for reasons known only to herself, is moving to the crazyland of Florida.
On a truly trivial note, I went to WalMart’s website to order bottled water to be delivered. Supposedly out of stock.
WALMART claims to be out of stock on BOTTLED WATER.
Is there an apocalypse in progress I hadn’t heard about yet?
I often like to find and watch old TV shows and movies on YouTube. They have ads, but heck, they had ads to begin with on TV, so the ads haven’t bothered me too much.
They still don’t, but they have become jarring. Why? Because in the last week or so, they’re in French.
I understand. Here in Canada, you’ve got to produce ads in French if you’re going to reach the third of Canadians who are more comfortable in French. But there has traditionally been a split between English-speaking media and French-speaking media: English media broadcast only in English (no French, including commercials), while French media broadcast only in French (no English, including commercials). But I guess YouTube didn’t get the memo. Or forgot about it. Or assumed that all Canadians speak French, and just watch English-speaking YouTube for S&G.
While it’s nothing that I cannot ignore, it is a little jarring:
“Blablablabla Tide Pods blablabla …”
“Blablablabla Scrubbing Bubbles blablabla …”
“Blablablabla Old Spice blablabla …”
If I have to have ads from YouTube, I’d rather they be in English. But I can deal with French. That’s why this is a mini-rant.