As you may recall, my big kitchen makeover was not because I want to live in a home with my dream kitchen. Is was, in fact, a way to make sure we could sell our house for our long distance relocation.  (If you want the full reveal see this post)

Now that the kitchen is complete, and I have finished cleaning up the mess that was left in its wake, it is time to get onto the home selling process.

I am fortunate that I have sold a house before, and I am addicted to HGTV so I am pretty familiar with the ins and outs of getting a house ready for the market.

For this sale I knew I wanted professional photographs of the house taken, since you can clearly tell when a professional has taken images vs. some relatively clueless realtor.

People's exhibit 1:
Both of these were taken from currently active MLS listings I stumbled upon


Now which kitchen do YOU want to buy?

So that brings me back to my kitchen. These were the shots that I took:



And my photographer:





You can get a much better feel for the true size and layout of the kitchen in his photographs. He was able to capture a lot more light (even though they were taken at the same time of day as mine) and his wide angles allow you to actually see the whole kitchen not just short segments.

You can also see how much more I removed from the counters. The coffee pot, knives and fruit have been removed. I replaced it with my white stand mixer which gives you a better idea of how large the counterspace really is. I also replaced my brown utensil holder with a stainless one. I moved the coffee pot and a potted plant on top of the radiator cover (to convey that it is a workable surface) and where a toaster oven used to be, I put a simple tall spikey plant to play off all the circular patterns in the room (the valances, the wreath, the lights, the spice jars and the doorfronts on the washer and dryer). There isn't much on the counters really.. but you can never have too little on your kitchen counters.

LESS IS MORE people!!

And just to put this all in perspective, these are the pictures from the listing when we bought it:

There are no words... there are no words.