Preparing the House for Sale

Perhaps the biggest drag to getting into Dragonfly Cohousing is the sequence of housing that precedes living in the project. When construction is completed - sometime next year - everyone involved needs to purchase their unit within a week of the finish. We won't know that date exactly until perhaps a couple days prior. So, we have to sell our current homes well in advance to this.

Three families in our cohousing community have already sold their homes. Ours is for sale now and once it sells, we will move into a rental home with some friends. Yes, we will share a 5-bedroom home with another family of four. This way we can give notice to our landlord a month in advance to the completion of our cohousing project and close on our new property when it is required.

But in order to sell our current home, some minor renos had to happen. I had to remove my DVD shelves (which held 800 DVDs on display in our livingroom) and all the pictures on the wall. I then went around and puttied all the holes in the house and painted.

Then I replaced our carpet with laminate flooring. This proved to be a large job and it was only possible with the help of my good friend Tamer. He lent me all of his tools including laminate installation specific tools, a skill saw and a miter saw.



Tamer also gave me hand tearing out the carpet and giving me very helpful tips on putting the laminate in. The actual laminate was free as our friends (the ones who we will move in with) had their basement laminate replaced because it was slightly damaged in one area (insurance had the whole floor replaced because that type of laminate isn't available anymore). So I picked up 700 sq ft of perfectly laminate flooring. I even sold the last 92 sq ft on kijiji!



Now the house is ready to go. We are selling with Comfree.com - which stands for commission free, so we will only pay the buyer realtor a flat fee that we agree upon, saving us up to $10,000. It only cost us $300 to have our house listed on the comfree website, have photos taken, 4 signs, a discount on a lawyer, have the selling process explained and have our home listed on realtor.ca (MLS). Pretty sweet deal!