Day 1- Designing to Sell Our House

It was something that we figured would be inevitable one day even when we first built our house.  But at the same time while living here I always thought it was a long way off.  But now its here.  Its time to think about selling our house and getting a bigger one.  We are out-growing our house and are feeling the growing pains.  We want to have another kid at some point in the next year or 2 so we would need at least 1 more bedroom and more storage.  Right now no place to put clothes and toys that the kids grow out of.  So last week we started looking around Spring Hill for houses.  We kind of have an idea of what we want but a lot of things have to fall into place before we can make it happen.  First off we have been consulting God for wisdom in how best to go about this.  We know we need more space but we don't want to get carried away and get in over our head with things that we "want" but don't necessarily need.
Some things in our favor are the low interest rates.  We can get a lot more house for not much more than we are paying now on our house simply because the interest rates are lower.  However, the opposite side is that means we may not get out of our house what we would need to when we sell it so we can have a down payment on the next one.  Another thing in our favor is that Ryan is working close to home and will hopefully be around more as a result so we can start getting our house ready to sell.
So today I went and picked some paint colors at home depot so we can paint our Great Room, Entry, and upstairs hallway.  We will also be re-painting our master bathroom a nice neutral.  We figured not everyone would like our purple we have on the walls now.  Then I went and got some bathroom accessories to match on clearance/sale at Target - in the event after we paint that we would be showing it I'd like to have nice matching soap pumps- towels- rugs etc- which we do not have right now.  Something I always thought wasn't a priority because nobody sees our bathroom.  Well now people will want to go in and out of it so I am going to make it look nice.
We won't start painting til after the first of November until our new church building is done.  This would mean Ryan would be free on the weekend and we could hopefully knock it out in a Fri, Sat, Sun.- weekend project with the help of family- and sending the girls to Gram-ee's over the weekend.  But until we can paint Ryan started today on power washing our deck so that it looks like we have a cedar deck again!  Its amazing what a little water pressure will do to 5 1/2 year old wood that has been sitting outside.  Then we will be sealing it or staining it soon.
We also will be storing a lot of stuff so as to make the house not look so full and cluttered.  And I know that toys should not be visible if at all possible when showing.  This will be difficult because I stay at home and toys are out ALL day long.  But we are hoping that with a couple open houses that maybe we can narrow the window of when I would have to show it.  I would need plenty of notice before showing so I can clean!
We plan to start off selling it FOR SALE BY OWNER and seeing what happens.  Then our next option is to do a trade with a builder that we like and see what price we can come to on the house we want to build.  We'll see.  We will just trust God that if this is supposed to happen that He will lay it all out for us and open doors where we need them.  We figure what's the harm in trying?  The stuff we do to our house will only make it nicer and were things we had planned on doing at some point and in a way now they are ACTUALLY getting done!

So stay tuned for updates on our Design-to-Sell our house!  Its exciting but at the same time I feel totally at the mercy of what God would have us to do.  We want to be good stewards for what he has blessed us with.  Ultimately I would like for this next house to be "it" for us and that we could grow old in it and not have to move again.