I see at least a dozen houses that are for sale each week. If and when you ever sell your house, remember these tips below.
- Give your house a deep clean- including bathroom grout, oven, fridge, all the “hard” things you don’t clean on a regular basis. If you aren’t a good cleaner, pay someone else to do it.
- Declutter, declutter, declutter!
- Use closets for their designated use. For example, no kitchen appliances in the front coat closet. You don’t need your buyer realizing right away that the huge Kitchen Aid mixer they got for a wedding present won’t find in your tiny kitchen cabinets.
- Your clothes belong in the master closet…ONLY…no matter how small it is. (I’m talk to you, bungalow owners.)
- Clean out the old nasty food in the fridge- it will be opened and people will judge you.
- Keep religious décor to a minimum or remove completely. You may think it’s tasteful but other do not. Take it down.
- If you must keep a litter box in the house, it needs to be cleaned every day if not more. Better yet, let your best friend babysit your cat while you show your house.
- Keep personal pictures to a minimum. People will look at them. And please take down your professional pregnancy photos. Please.
- Take everything off your fridge.
- NO ANIMAL HEADS. None. At all. (And it doesn’t make a difference that “you harvest the meat from the animals you kill.” People still get offended.)
- Make your closets and pantry look spacious. If that means you need to rent a storage unit or donating all those random canned goods then do it.
- Rent a carpet cleaner (less than $50 a day) and clean your carpets. They will look so much better and it will help with any pet odors.
- Speaking of pet odors… Ask someone who doesn’t have pets if your house smells of animals. You are used to it and aren’t a good judge.
- All the stuff (crap) your baby, toddler, kids need/use/play with should go in their room. Get some bins or large baskets for their room and stick all that stuff in them. You don’t need your living room to look like a playroom because that’s when they realize you don’t have a playroom and they might need a playroom.
- Take all the teenie bopper stuff off the walls (and ceilings, believe it or not) of your pre-teen or teenager’s room.
- Refrain from cooking fish, Indian, Asian, or Middle Eastern food while your house is on the market.
- Don’t smoke, duh.
- Take all those expensive energy efficient light bulbs and store them for your next house. Do this for ALL the lights in the house. Replace them with normal, cheap bulbs that do not take 15 minutes to “warm up.” While those lights are warming up, your buyer is thinking your house doesn’t have enough light.
- Remove anything from your house that lives in an aquarium that is not a fish.
- Keep the pool clean even if that means hiring a pool boy. You don’t need the buyer to actually know that taking care of a pool is a major expense and pain in the ass. And we certainly don’t want them realizing that the beautiful tree in the back drops thousands of leaves a day into the pool.
- Don’t leave your dog(s) at the house during showings even if you leave them outside/in a kennel/in the laundry room/etc. I agree that anyone who doesn’t like dogs are terrible people but lots of people out there have a serious problem with them.
The goal is to make people look at your home and not your stuff. You obviously don’t think you or your lifestyle is strange or distracting because it is YOU. However, potential buyers might not feel the same way. You want your home to appear as if it’s easy and comfortable to live there. You are trying to create a neutral palate for buyers to walk into and picture themselves living there. Selling your house and keeping it “show ready” is not an easy task. Nor is it always inexpensive. Follow the tips above and hopefully your house will sell quickly so you can go back to leaving the bed unmade and the dirty coffee mug in the sink each morning.
When Ike hit, 
