The Clear Out Continues + For Sale Sign Goes Up
7 minute read ⌚
Having obtained our 190 Permanent Residency Visa in November 2024, after a relatively quick application process, we are now at the point where we are ready to sell our house.
The funds from this sale are vital to us as they will provide us with enough (hopefully!) to start our new life in South Australia, as well as squirrelling some away for the time when we are ready to buy a property again.
In my opinion, the house sale has already been the most stressful part of our emigration journey so far. For a number of reasons. From questioning when is an ideal time to put the house on the market to what might happen if the house doesn’t sell in time for us to activate our visas on Australian soil.
In October, even before our visas were granted we started to list and sell our belongings. The advice from fellow expats was that you can never start to clear your house early enough and that you will definitely underestimate how much stuff you actually own.
And they weren’t wrong!
After a successful start of selling bits and pieces on Vinted, Facebook Marketplace and eBay, it is incredible to witness how many things can fit into a cupboard or a drawer and this task starts to feel really overwhelming. Every cupboard just feels like another mountain to climb. I think the best thing for anyone to do is to keep going. Keep sorting, keep listing, keep reducing.
You will get there…it just takes a long time to feel like you are even making a dent in the piles! Tackle one small area at a time, rather than trying to take on a whole room.
Our next plan in our bid to get rid is to take a big pile down to the local car boot and see if we can shift multiple toys, games and other household items in one go. Just waiting for it to stop being so bitterly cold as I doubt it will be as successful to buy or sell when you can’t feel your fingers and toes! The last thing we want is to pack the car up in the hope of offloading it all only to come back home with the same amount.
On top of the reduction of everything we own, we also had (and still have) a fair bit of DIY to do around the house. This is probably the only time in the whole process where I have said to myself ‘I wish I would have done this sooner’. In the last month, we have: decorated the kitchen, repaired doors, tidied the garden (as best we can in the crap weather), decorated the upstairs bathroom including laying a new floor and decorated the downstairs bathroom. We have also had the boiler serviced, the roof cleaned and a couple of roof tiles replaced.
As well as a pretty heavy month at work for us both and keeping the rest of the house as clean and tidy as possible to prep for photos for the listing and then viewings-I think this probably explains why it feels like it has been the most stressful part of the process so far.
Fingers crossed, all of this hard work and preparation will pay off and we will have a quick and smooth sale process. The fact that it is completely out of our hands and has a time constraint does increase the old anxiety somewhat, but we have just got to trust the process.
We are pleased with the progress we have made. The photos for the listing look really good (as good as we can make the house without spending more money!) and we kicked off the viewings with 7 people looking around last Saturday.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t yet resulted in a sale or any offers but after just over a week on the market, we won’t start to panic just yet.
We have given ourselves plenty of time (so we have been told) to sell the house and be out in Australia by August as we have planned all along.
Avoiding people’s horror stories of buyers pulling out last minute and manifesting all of the positive vibes we can! Wish us luck!
