8 Inexpensive Ways to Prepare Your Home for Sale
November 14, 2016Are you selling your home or thinking about doing so? Time to get to work – your home needs a pre-sale makeover. Once you’ve decided to sell it, think of your home more like a product and less like your home. You probably don’t want to invest a lot of money in major changes (despite what certain home renovation shows encourage). Here are eight inexpensive ways to prepare your home for a satisfying sale:
Remove Half of Your Stuff
Buyers want to imagine themselves in your home, and they can’t do it if it’s full of your stuff. Banish your clutter and create spaciousness. Unless you’re a minimalist, you probably have a lot to remove. Now is the time for a major purge.
For most items, if you haven’t looked at them in a year, you probably don’t need them anymore. Homes for sale also generally look better with less furniture, so get some feedback from your real estate agent on what to remove. Spend as long as it takes to clear your house of half your things: throw away, recycle, donate, and sell what you no longer want and put the rest in a storage unit. See this list from Realtor.com for decluttering tips before a home sale. Everything that’s left should be arranged neatly, with personal items out of sight and off floors and surfaces.
Fix the Problems That Are Easy to Fix
Do you have marks on the wall from nails, discolored grout in the bathroom or an old refrigerator? You might not notice them, but a potential buyer will. Make a list of all the small projects and get a handy person in for the day to fix them all (or if you’re the handy one block out time to do this). If your appliances are old – and you have the cash – consider replacing them. For a checklist of things you should consider repairing, click here.
Repaint the Walls
Consider repainting your walls with neutral colors if you haven’t repainted in the past two years or you have highly personal color choices. If you are handy and detail-oriented, you could consider doing this yourself. If you’re not, a professional painter is worth the money.
Refresh Your Floors
Beautiful wood floors can add value to your home. If you have them, consider refinishing them if they are damaged or scratched or update them to a modern stain. According to Realtor.com, costs can be as low as $1 per square foot for recoating and as high as $5 per square foot for a custom look. If you have older carpet, consider replacing it (costs $1-$10 per square foot installed for) for a fresh and clean look. If your carpets are newer, get them professionally cleaned.
Clean the Inside until Spotless – and Keep it Clean
Even if you’re a clean freak, you’ll probably have to keep your home even cleaner while you’re showing it to potential buyers. Once you’ve refreshed your interior, give your home a top to bottom cleaning (or hire someone to do it for you). Think of it as if you are “detailing” your home. Look at every baseboard and around every light switch. Your home should pass the white glove test.
The hard part will be keeping it that way during the period you are showing your home. That’s when you’ll be glad you removed half your stuff. There’s less to clean now!
Beautify Your Yard
Once the inside of your home is squeaky clean, you can turn to the outside. Rake leaves, mow the lawn regularly and weed all your gardens. Put down mulch (if you use it) for a fresh look. Plant flowers around your home and/or in pots by your front door.
And speaking of the door – does it look good? If not, add that to the list of things to be painted. For more tips on landscaping your home to increase curb appeal, click here.
Upgrade Your Lighting
Good lighting can add to your home’s appeal to potential buyers. Make sure each room has at least three sources of lighting. This could be overhead lighting, standing lamps, table lamps, etc. Real estate agents will often leave all the lights on when showing a home so use energy efficient bulbs (and prepare for higher electricity bills during that period). For more tips on lighting, see this article.
Hire a Professional Stager
There’s a science to making homes look their best for a sale. Consider consulting with a home staging expert to set your home up for maximum appeal to potential buyers. A stager will work with what you already have in your home to rearrange and redecorate. Please don’t take her feedback personally if she doesn’t like your floor to ceiling collection of knickknacks and wants to banish them to storage. It’s a stager’s job to look at your home objectively to have the broadest appeal to buyers.
Selling your home can be an emotional time. The process you go through to prepare your home for sale not only sets you up to succeed, but also prepares you for your eventual move. It’s work – but it doesn’t have to be expensive!
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