It’s that time again! Sell the house. We do this every 2-3 years to stay on our toes and just to do something different. People call us mad. Maybe. But its interesting to move to a completely new place, with a bunch of new neighbours, gossip and shops to get your head around and with the added bonus of leaving the less desirable people you happened to be positioned next to at your previous address. It’s all good fun.

Anyway, selling a house is all about applying the 6 P’s - Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. And when someone says the word planning, I reach for my index cards. On each card we wrote the name of a room, plus non-rooms such as cellar, loft, garden and car. We stepped through house and brainstormed what tasks needed to be completed to best market each room. For example, remove pizza boxes (I can’t believe I still do this - grow up Cleve), clean the toilet (mental note - assign this one to the missus), paint ceiling, and so on. These were added to that room’s the index card. Once all the cards were completed, we sat down agreed effort estimates in undisturbed hours and cost in pounds sterling. We quickly added up the effort estimates and costs, and got a completion date and overall budget.

Now, a week into this and we are ahead of schedule. Sweet! And, having done this 4 times before, this is by far the most enjoyable prepare for sale experience we have ever had. Why? Because it is not ad-hoc like all the other times that we have done it. We know how much more we have to do before we are done. Basically, there are two piles of index card above our fireplace - the completed and not completed pile. A simple but clear visual reminder of outstanding work. Also, if I have a spare couple of hours, I trot downstairs, pick up a card and start work. No need to liase with the missus on what I should do or what she is working on - if the card is on the “not completed” pile - take it and do it! It’s that simple.

Another really interesting aspect to it is the budget. Because we are tracking estimates against actuals, and because we are currently underspending, we are able to hire workmen to do work we planned to do ourselves to bring the completion date in. This is proving to be very useful indeed.

Anyway, enough already. I’ll let you know how things are progressing in a couple of weeks time…