The Ten Commandments
for Selling an Infested Home

If you’re living in a home that’s infested (either with kids, pets or both) then you know how tough it can be to get a home like that ready for potential buyers. Well, I’ve managed to sell a few heavily-infested homes (at one point, I had five kids, two dogs and two cats crammed into a house that we needed to sell—fast), and I’ve made my share of mistakes while I was at it. Here’s what I’ve learned about listing—and selling—homes that are full of creatures with poor self-control, and even less bladder control.

Once the For Sale sign goes up…

1. Stop cooking broccoli. Nothing attracts a last-minute showing the way boiling broccoli does. Unfortunately, nothing repels offers faster than the smell of boiling broccoli does.

2. Don’t feed broccoli to children. This may sound repetitive, but it is not. Broccoli (cooked or raw) is converted by children’s stomachs into a frothy green substance that can shoot many feet past their usual vomit range, and which will not come out of carpets without a shop vac.

3. Don’t list your home during pet shedding seasons. Those seasons are spring and fall (plus summer and winter, if you have a long-haired cat). Through the 11 days our first house was listed, I had to vacuum the main floor carpets four times daily. Why? Because our oldest, most mangy cat kept leaving enormous wads of brown fur all over our freshly vacuumed beige rugs.

4. Never hide big things under small beds. One night, I stuffed a queen-sized comforter under my five-year-old’s bed. When she discovered this monstrosity the next morning, she yanked it out…breaking a leg off her bed. In a desperate attempt to hide what she’d done, she stuffed the comforter into her small closet…breaking the closet door off its track. When the potential buyers showed up several hours later, what had been the cutest kid room in the house now had a busted closet and a paint can propping up the bed.

5. Never leave kids unsupervised indoors. On the day of our first open house, I fed my kids a quick lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sent them off to brush their teeth and then hustled everyone out the door. When we got home four hours later, I found a beautiful collage of peanut butter and soap hand prints all over the bathroom mirror.

6. Ban all unauthorized doggie snacking. A dog’s digestive tract can single-handedly prevent the sale of a home. One day our Great Dane, Duke, managed to sneak a hamburger off of my oldest child’s plate. He developed the most breathtakingly bad case of dog farts I’ve ever endured. He completely saturated our home with an odor that I hadn’t smelled since our neighbor’s sewer backup ten years earlier. We had two families coming to look at our house that night. As you can imagine, neither family put in an offer.

7. Bake cookies—then turn off the stove. Baking oatmeal cookies is a great way to make a house smell welcoming. But if you forget they’re in the stove when you race out of the house, your real estate agent (and the potential buyers) will be greeted by a screaming smoke detector and the smell of incinerated oatmeal—not real selling points, no matter how clean your house is that day.

8. Be wary of killer vacuums. Vacuums are dangerous pieces of equipment and should be treated as such. I’ve always prided myself in never having sprained any part of my body. My spotless record was demolished within days of listing our second house. In my haste to clean, I tripped over the vacuum hose (twice) and sprained my right ankle (twice).

9. Consider diapering the dog. Our Great Dane found it stressful to be cooped up in the van with us every time we had to drive around while the real estate agent showed buyers our home. By the tenth day, Duke had diarrhea. He made a statement (a big statement) in the van.

10. Consider diapering all the kids. The only early morning showing we had was the morning I woke up to discover that my three youngest kids had all soaked their beds. Our house smelled like a urinal. Unfortunately, that was also the day that I incinerated the oatmeal cookies.

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