@jeromedawg, it's been a month with no updates. What's happening?
Sorry for the lack of updates - it's been a whirlwind. Since posting we hustled to lock in rent (we're now in a 2/1 apartment and no garage coming from a 3/2 condo with garage and storage lol), move most of our stuff out or to the garage for temporary storage, get our place painted/fixed/cleaned up, listed, and now are currently in the middle of reviewing multiple offers and counteroffers. We started moving stuff over to our apartment unit the first week of August and are mostly settled in. A ton of our crap is sitting in the garage at the old place and some of it's being used as part of staging, so we're basically waiting until we get into escrow and have a committed buyer/deal before scheduling to move all that to a storage unit. The new place is much too small to bring everything over (hence the storage unit) but it has been somewhat nice downsizing too.
We were so exhausted with packing and moving all our crap out to try to hit the "mid-August target deadline" we wanted for listing but made it. We listed 8/13 last Thurs and are on the cusp of either accepting an extremely favorable and strong offer and potentially may still get even more favorable ones (there's somewhat of a bidding war going on now). *crossing fingers*
After we close, I think we'll be relieved... until we decide to start looking for a permanent place lol
In the end, you worried about a lot of small problems, most of which turned out to be nothing, and you will get the place sold at a good price with not a lot of effort. That's a win in my book, and an experience to remember next time you start looking at the leaves on the individual trees instead of at the forest.
I do think the place wouldn't have showed as well as it has if we didn't put in the hard work (and we worked tirelessly to clean things up). To me, it did feel like a lot of effort. And our realtor has been extremely busy as well. If we didn't want to do anything, I suppose we could have sold it as-is but who knows how that would have impacted the price. Our realtor under-listing brought in a lot of traffic but I think if we hadn't washed each window inside and out (something our realtor suggested we have done, not necessarily by ourselves but in general) and spent time/a little money with cleaning things up to make it look as turnkey as possible, it wouldn't have netted us the offers we're working with right now. I could be 110% wrong and just trying to justify the aggressive timeline we moved on haha.
We're still not out of the gates at the moment on that note - just trying to figure out how much more to negotiate with the offers we have on the table. It's a bit stressful but definitely an experience we won't forget.