In last week’s installment about How to Sell Your Own House, I talked about how to get your house ready to go on the market. This section is all about how to actually put it on the market.

If you sign with a realtor and agree to pay them 3% of your house’s selling price, they offer a full range of services, including photographing, marketing, holding open houses, connecting with other agents, and listing your house on the MLS. If you opt to sell your house yourself, you have to undertake all these components on your own. Here are my recommendations:

• Get a professional photographer: Although professional photography is

We did it, friends. Matt and I sold our house by ourselves without listing it with an agent, which saved us approximately $7,500.

I have to confess that I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to pull it off. Our house was on the market for 3.5 months. At the three-month mark, we started connecting with a realtor. We came very close to signing with them. In fact, their forms were in my e-mail inbox; I just didn’t have time to deal with them because I was scurrying to meet my book deadline. And then we received an offer.

Selling a house is hard, hard work, but

When Matt and I were unpacking and moving into our new home in Austin, we tried to keep Montessori principles and ideas at the forefront of our minds as much as possible. I went back to this post about how to set up each area of the home. Of course we had to make adjustments based on the space we have and the set-up of our new rental house.

The living room is the hub of our home. We don’t need a separate “play room” for Henry because we spend most of our time in the living room, and he wants to be where we are. We intentionally devoted