Paris Blog: Putting the house on the market

There was a bit of delay since our last Paris post and this is primarily due to for how busy life has become. Moving houses can be a bit of a production, but downsizing from a full American townhouse house into an French apartment 75% smaller has left us rather…time constrained (or at least, energy constrained).

But, the final days in our old house were a lot of fun. After we moved out a lot of the furniture in efforts of “de-cluttering”, we decided to do a bit of painting – mostly to remove a few years worth of bikes going up and down the stairs and past walls…plenty of tire marks.

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Once all of the paint dried all we had to do was simply put all of the furniture back and submit our pictures to the relator to start the process for listing it for rental.  The whole rental/landlord process was fairly interesting to us.  We ultimately went with a management ‘company’ (well, just one person tied to a company) since it allows us to not worry about the property.  Had we just been down the street, we probably would have simply handled everything ourselves.  But with a 6-hour time change and nearly 4,000 miles between us – having someone our tenant could call immediately was key.

For your visual entertainment, here is the house, from the bottom up. Where everything from our training, blogging, baking, and even first date took place.  I was actually so pleased with how clean and organized the place was, I joked with Ray that maybe we could stay a little longer!

1) Training Room: You’ve seen countless times in many posts, and as part of the CompuTrainer Room post).  This was all the way back in late April/May – hence the bike there being the nice Specialized test bike.

1stFloorDen

2) Entry way: Otherwise know as “run exit”.  It’s here that perhaps hundreds of bike-run bricks started from:

1stFloorFoyer

3) Kitchen: Bertie’s Bakery Lab Workspace.  This is officially the most sparkly this space has or ever will be.

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4) Extension of Training Room: “Rest and Regeneration”.  It used to be that dueling trainers were up here, but we eventually moved them downstairs to recapitalize this space into a ‘normal persons’ living room.

2ndFloorLivingRoomPic2

5) Master Bedroom: Insert cheeky comment here

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6) Office: DCRainmaker Lab workspace & the Turtle’s formal residence.  To the right of the turtle tank is where virtually every unboxing photo shoot occurred, on that nifty Ikea storage shelf.  Fear not, that’s one of only two pieces of furniture that actually came with us to France (gotta keep consistency!).  And to the right of that is the giant Gadget Cave.  That got disassembled and is now in a massive stash of boxes sitting besides us here in Paris.

3rdFloorOfficePic1

7) Guest Room: Oh, and storage area for 8 years of stuff!  It’s always where Sharkey typically hung out.  No matter where we left him in the house, he always drifted up to the 4th floor and hovered about the guest bed.

4thFloor-GuestRmPic3

With that, we were ready to list it for rental, both as furnished and unfurnished.  Because our order of operations were slightly out of whack, we actually didn’t know what house we’d have in Paris – so we had to assume that all furniture wasn’t coming with us.  Thus, we hoped one might pickup the place furnished, so we wouldn’t have to deal with selling it.  In the end, the renter went with unfurnished – but we may have actually turned a profit on Craiglist.  Pretty solid.

Normally you’d probably pay someone to take photos – but we figured our photographic skills were up to par, and did them all ourselves.

We pressed send on an email with the pictures above to our realtor (and a whole lot more photos), and before we knew it we were posted to the MLS system, which is the consolidated listing system for realtors (both buy and rental).  Interestingly, no such system exists in France (but that’s for another post).

MLSListing2

Astonishingly, less than 24 hours later the house was under contract for a long term multi-year renter. Fast and sweet.  And, less than two weeks later we’d be out of the place.  Nuts!

Most of all we are super excited for our our next Paris Post of “House Hunters International” (well, our version of it anyway).  We saw a dozen houses, and have consolidated it down to the ‘best of’ bunch.

Thanks for reading!

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18 Comments

  1. Where are you gonna live? downtown or suburb? If you need any advises, please contact me,

    Sebastien

  2. kab

    i need a place like that for my wine!! great post. i love to live vicariously through you guys :)

  3. I am envious of your awesome wine fridge! And that was one gorgeous kitchen. Can’t wait to see what your place in Paris looks like!

  4. like the others, i am in awe of your wine fridge. i kept looking for more photos of it, but nothing ever showed up.

  5. Cheeky comment. The specific place of our first date.

  6. Am I super lame for not even noticing the wine fridge? I love your townhouse, esp. that it gives you a great training area. Can’t wait to see the Paris side of house hunting!

  7. Anonymous

    Cheeky comment—Where the ‘magic’ happens (cue cheesy ’70’s bow-chicka-wow-wow music) ;)

  8. Fantastic! I’m so glad to hear things worked out in your favor—and quickly!

    Sarah
    http://www.thinfluenced.com

  9. Thanks Senior (and all)!

    On the wine fridge, it was actually an odd project that a co-worker and I did about 8 years ago. I had just moved to the area and the column that’s there was annoyingly small and useless. At the time I had a good sized wine collection (about 150 bottles), though that was pre-triathlon/running phase. Once I started training, it got neglected.

    At any rate, we actually destroyed the other non-load bearing wall, and then re-built the entire column around the wine fridge and doing all the electrical as well. It can be removed, should it need to be.

    I know there are some other photos of it elsewhere, but I couldn’t easily find others either. So, I uploaded a better shot:

    link to sites.google.com

    Enjoy!

    As for our place in Paris – definitely in the center of Paris, but you’ll have to stay tuned for that post. Good times ahead!

  10. Anonymous

    Bienvenu en France ! En espérant voir le faiseur de pluie sur les irons mans France ;) .

  11. Awesome..really nice article. i like the color combination in Training Room and Entry way.

  12. Color combination are too good…Thanks its beautiful…

  13. beautiful pictures i like your post.. :)

  14. I enjoyed reading this post and i appreciate your thought…

  15. Really nice interior in Master Bedroom.

  16. You have put great efforts for designing your home. I also want to design my own home. Thanks for sharing!!!!!!

  17. excellent…. Interior design and color combinations are really awesome.

  18. Love the article! I really enjoy reading and learning new things about house maintenance and your post is very helpful and unique. Thanks for sharing!