Repopulating vs. Unencumbering

My house was in some ways an experiment which was past its wind-down time. It was a serious fix-er-uppper when I bought it, and I had done most of the renovation myself, with little experience at either the planning or the execution of the work. Before S. moved in, it was partitioned into two units and I lived downstairs and rented the upstairs out to a series of tenants. When she first moved in, we were initially still just downstairs but when we decided to retrieve her son from her mother and bring him back to live with us, I evicted the tenant and demolished the upstairs kitchen, turning it into a bedroom for V. Not long after we got back with him, we got S.'s furniture out of storage and moved it into the house, displacing most of what passed for furniture of mine. And the next year, her ex decided that he did not want to keep paying to store what had been his half of their stuff, so we returned to the same storage place and loaded up all his things and brought them back as well. The house was not big enough to accommodate all of it, so much of it went to the building where S. worked, which was to be demolished to make way for a condo tower. At that point, most of what little remained in the house of mine did not make the grade and was disposed of as well.
The result of this was that when I kicked her out, she took almost all of the furniture, leaving me with nothing but the voluminous clutter I had accumulated during the seven plus years I had been in the house. The idea of starting again to repopulate that house, first with furniture and then with a family, seemed quite infeasible. With that persuasive thought in hand, it was easy enough to go hunting for additional ammunition to back my decision. For one thing, I feel like I have never really been a good fit in my neighbourhood, which of course is only partially truth and partially cognitive distortion.
Back in March I wrote about talking with LB, and how remarkable it was that she seemed to read me and my situation so accurately and effortlessly. LB has a couple of interesting businesses she works in, including the one which she had been starting up when I met her, which was a house staging thing. I had been thinking about it and decided for a number of reasons that it was an appropriate time to move on from my house, so I engaged her to take on the project of buffing my dusty mess into something I could put on the market.