My sister is getting ready to take on a cross country move to Seattle and facing the decision whether to pay to move all of her things ($$$$!) or sell it and start over. She, along with many of you, asked if we regret selling our furnishings with our last home. After 6 weeks of living here, I feel like I could finally share my thoughts on it.
Moving is emotional in a lot of ways and I’ll admit not having furniture has probably added to feelings of being unsettled over the last month, but I also think it just takes time to get used to a place. We hadn’t planned on selling our furniture or decor but when the buyer (moving here from another state) asked if we were open to it, we thought about it for a few days and decided —Â sure, why not!Â
We knew from a previous move that furniture rarely transfers into a new space. (And that was made clear again when all of our rugs that we brought with us suddenly look tiny. ) But what made us say yes was actually thinking fondly of our previous home and a lot of the pieces in it felt like they belonged with that home. It would have been more sad for me to keep all of my furniture, move it here, get frustrated that it doesn’t fit and then decide to sell it and replace it. Like maybe some of the fondness associated with our home or the pieces in it would be lost. Of course that’s not always going to be the case, sometimes furniture will transfer fine and you can be set up and settled and give it in a new life in your new space and that’s a sweet scenario, too.
Bottom line for us, although our new home is a little echo-y right now (with the exception of Jordan’s sofa and our new rug ) , we don’t regret selling our furniture and we’re excited to choose pieces that feel like this home over time. In fact, I am a little bummed we didn’t have time to have a yard sale before we moved and sell more…as I’m still staring at a basement full of boxes that I haven’t even wondered what was in them once since moving here.
So how did we actually sell our furniture? How did it work? While keeping specific details private for the sake of the new homeowner, this is how it went down. The sale of our home was 100% separate from the furnishings sale. We received two separate deposits at closing. The buyer specifically asked for certain things in our home and then said he had $x set aside to purchase other furnishings. Of course it was up to us what we wanted to sell and we priced things accordingly.
We made a spreadsheet in excel, divided by room, of each item we would sell in that room. We wrote the original retail price and then what we would sell it for (depending on condition, wear, and honestly how attached we were to it). For instance, our short wood round coffee table in the green room I really loved and would have brought with us. We purchased it for about $1500 and I priced it at $1000 and the buyer decided to purchase it–which was fine! That was the price I would let it go for. Most things, we priced at around half the original cost, some things even less. Our kitchen stools had some wear and we sold all 4 for $50. We knew our dining table wouldn’t translate to our new home so selling it for half of what we paid for it and not having to move it, saved us money, too.
At the end of listing the items for sale in each room we did a subtotal of what it would be to buy new vs. what we were selling it for and added everything up to show a grand total for everything in the house, too. In the end, the buyer pretty much bought everything on the list–I think the way we organized the excel sheet helped for sure.
It took 6 years and many iterations to get our last house just right so I’m not anticipating rooms to come together at once. Some spaces/pieces we are investing a little more in up front and some I’m completely happy with a phase 1 find for now.
Hopefully that answers some of your questions! If you were moving across the country, would you bring everything with you??
We’re moving to our retirement home from Pennsylvania to Arizona at the end of the year. When we moved here from Illinois in 2010, we came with 22,000 lbs of furnishings!! Most of it stayed boxed up in the basement all this time, literally! We just had an estate sale a couple weeks ago, and what didn’t sell, we gave away. We’re taking very little furniture—two beds, one dresser, two buffets, one antique dresser, one dining table and chairs and a few side tables and chairs. I kept my China because it was special to me but got rid of everything else kitchen-wise. I’m looking forward to finding things to fit the new house (which isn’t anything like what we have now).
We recently moved from Memphis to Des Moines and the buyers wanted several things from our home. We had help in pricing from a friend who stages homes. The mistake we made was that we didn’t have a house picked out yet and we now wish we had sold some things that we kept and wish we had not sold some things that we did!
Greetings from an OG follower of CLJ! I must admit that I couldn’t believe you guys sold everything in the house (I was missing your stuff for you!), and kept thinking how I could not imagine doing that. BUT, it has now been 1.5 years since we packed up our 33 years in Virginia and drove to a new life in California… and our closets are still un-usable because they are just boxes of items that won’t fit or work in our now much smaller home.
Even moving our enormous smoker/grill across the country, paying for movers, and selling it for $10 upon arrival just for more breathing room feels like we truly wasted so much money on movers because I was attached to things. What an expensive lesson. I hope your wisdom on this one informs more of your readers so they can avoid this costly lesson in their own moves. Thank you for your continued inspiration and honesty!!
Really interesting… this is one thing we have been considering as we contemplate our next move.
Very interesting – really great idea and I like how you set it up