How to Prepare a House for Sale by Decluttering, Depersonalizing, and Deep Cleaning.
It’s springtime, a time of year when most folks do a maniacal deep cleaning and purging of their homes. Springtime also means home selling season starts kicking into gear. Right about now calls to the real estate agent in your neighborhood are increasing, Home For Sale signs pop up on lawns like crocus flowers waking from winter slumber, and Sold signs signal a hot market.
If you’re considering selling your property, wanting to take advantage of high prices and low inventory, or you’re just needing more rooms, natural light, or a bigger yard, then you’ll need to prepare your house so it is presentable to prospective buyers.
Getting your house ready means making it look as attractive as possible to as broad a buying pool as is available. Preparing your home for sale goes beyond a fresh coat of paint or shoring up curb appeal. When you sell your home, you’ll want the best offer possible and a house that isn’t messy, cluttered, dirty, or screaming of your time in it, will give you the best chance to get to closing.
Cleaning and Beyond
MaidxChange is a Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding suburbs cleaning company so of course we are going to talk about cleaning tips for preparing your home for sale. Why? We know that cleaning helps create a valuable first impression. Open houses arranged by your real estate partner require you to prepare your home. Being ready for buyers to walk through your front door might warrant that you consider hiring professional cleaners like MaidxChange. We’ll get to how we approach open house cleanings in this post.
But, if you want to sell and create demand for a buyer, preparing goes beyond cleaning, and includes decluttering and depersonalizing your home.
Let’s lean in to how to get your home ready for selling and showing. Here are some tips to be aware of before putting a “house for sale” sign on your lawn. Follow this guide, prepare your home, and you’ll be one step closer to a quick and profitable sale!
We’ll break this down into several areas of focus: decluttering, depersonalizing, and deep cleaning.
We’ll start with a topic that is so resonant that it created a TV star and a famous quip about “sparking joy”.
Declutter (As If You Were Being Watched By Marie Kondo)
One of the best tips for readying your home for sale or for a showing is to declutter. There are two reasons for doing a thorough tidying up. First, it will make your home look and feel more spacious. A cluttered home can be overwhelming and distracting, which may make a potential buyer lose interest. Second, and very importantly, an uncluttered space is like a blank canvas that will help potential buyers visualize themselves living in your home.
Here are the steps we recommend to help declutter your home with selling in mind: sorting, tossing, designating.
You should start by sorting through your belongings and getting rid of anything you don’t need or don’t use.
Be ruthless in your decisions. Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a great resource for helping you to declutter your home. If you haven’t read it yet, we highly recommend that you do!
Spark Joy and Sell Quickly
Some of Marie’s key tenets include asking yourself if something is essential or brings you joy. Edit your home space to make sure it’s minimal for prospective buyers.
Think of all of the things you’ve collected over the years: trinkets, files, clothes you don’t wear, electronics that don’t work, vases that aren’t used, books, unfinished projects. Undoubtedly, the list is long. Decluttering means paring your home down to the essentials and tossing what you don’t need.
Try to adopt a “minimalist” mindset so what buyers see are the great archways and built-ins in your home and not the boxes of collectibles you haven’t looked at in 10 years.
Once you’ve sorted through belongings and tossed what doesn’t bring you “joy”, it’s important to designate areas for the things you’re keeping. This will help to keep your home feeling organized and tidy.
It’s the old adage, “A place for everything, and everything in it’s place.” Allocating specific places for things will help keep the clutter at bay.
Don’t Despair, It Takes A Village
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of decluttering your home, remember that taking small steps is better than doing nothing at all. Start with one room or one area of your home and work your way from there. And don’t forget to enlist the help of family and friends! They can be a great source of motivation and support.
If you have any questions or would like some assistance getting your home ready for sale, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
As a cleaning company, we come across a lot of situations where a home needs more than just a deep cleaning but requires organization and decluttering. That’s why we regularly partner with home organizing companies.
Ask us about a home organizing and deep cleaning package service. We’re here to help!
Depersonalize
Once you’ve decluttered your home, having gotten rid of (or hidden) those piles of magazines, old wooden tennis rackets, and the nicknacks that were lining your beautiful built in shelves, it’s time to depersonalize your home to get it ready to show.
This is an essential step and it means removing any items that may distract buyers from seeing the property itself instead of all of your personal touches.
It’s Not About You, It’s About Your Home
At the core, you should remove anything that is an expression of you or your life. Things such as photographs, family heirlooms, and religious artifacts. You may also want to remove any emotionally-charged items, such as a wedding album or a set of baby shoes, flags, trophies, paintings, etc.
The goal is to make the home feel like it could belong to anyone. Does your dining room table have a runner on it? Remove it before your open house showings. Posters on a child’s bedroom door? Take them down. Fresh flowers on a living room table? Well, you can keep them, as long as they are fresh :).
Neutral Spaces = Blank Canvases for Buyers
As mentioned earlier, buyers want to see a neutral space, to project their lives onto the canvas of the home, so creating that space for them to imagine where their art work, photographs, vases, and rugs go is essential.
Some home sellers choose to go a step further and completely change the appearance of their home. This might mean a little paint on the walls in a neutral color, removing all personal artwork, or replacing some the furniture with pieces that are more generic. If you decide to take this route, be sure to keep changes subtle; you don’t want buyers to feel like they’re walking into a completely different home than what the photos they saw online.
Deep Clean Before Showing Your Home To Buyers
A clean and tidy home will show potential buyers that you have taken good care of the property and that it is in move-in condition. A deep cleaning, often done once a year, during springtime, or sometimes when you’re moving INTO a home, should also be considered when you’re thinking about selling and showing your house.
What is a deep cleaning?
A deep cleaning means scrubbing all the home surfaces, cleaning the carpets, wiping down the windows and sills, hitting the baseboards, de-cobwebbing, dusting in corners, getting under appliances and into cabinets, vacuuming and washing floors.
This is a hands and knees type of cleaning. Or, getting on a ladder and wiping down dusty areas and light fixtures. Speaking of light fixtures, did you ever notice how light fixture sconces attract bugs that eventually end up dying and sitting at the bottom of your beautiful sconce? Buyers might notice those little black specks of dead bugs. That’s the type of detailed eye that house showing cleanings require.
Deep cleaning a home for a showing means getting the sconces down, soaking them in soapy water, and cleaning them. That will eliminate the bugs, but also may help improve the lighting in your home.
Here’s how MaidxChange tackles a pre-listing deep clean:
Kitchen
We start on the deep cleaning process by tackling the kitchen first. Our pros will wipe down the counters, cabinets, and appliances. Clean the stove and oven.
We clean UNDER the oven and refrigerators. Get inside the cabinets. We will make sure the kitchen fixtures are clean (nobody likes finger prints or food on drawer pulls). We also dust a room, including the kitchen, from top to bottom, hitting hard to reach corners, ledges, window sills, and tops of shelves.
If requested, our cleaners will also spiff up the back splash or floor tiling, especially the grouting. Tooth brushes come in handy for that work! Lastly, we vacuum the floors and wipe them clean.
Bathrooms
Next, we move on to the bathrooms. All the usuals, including scrubbing down the sinks, toilets, and shower/tub. Glass mirrors and windows get cleared up. And again, we vacuum and mop the floors.
Common Areas
We’ll finish up by cleaning all of the other rooms in the home, including the living room, bedrooms, and office.
Whether you’ve moved your furniture out of the house, or you’re staging it with the furniture of Joanna Gaines, you’ll want to make sure common areas of the home are deep cleaned before a showing.
Dust Collectors
Going deep means paying more attention to areas where dirt loves to live unbothered. Places like the corners of hallways, underneath a foyer table, landing areas and on wooden staircases. Look up! You might see silky grey cobwebs attached to the ceiling. We’ll goo get them with a feather duster or swiffer. Dust common room area ceiling fans and light fixtures.
Clean and Polish
If your furniture will be in the home during a showing, liven it up by polishing. You’d be surprised how wood (or even steel) can be brought back to life with a little care. Take everything off bookcases, coffee tables, built ins, and wipe with a dusting brush. Then use a few drops of wood cleaner or polish to get a shine.
Closets
Closet spaces are big selling points to buyers. They will be inspecting your walk in, bedroom, bathroom, and hallway closets. As mentioned, make sure they can see these spaces by decluttering and depersonalizing them.
After all of that effort, don’t forget to clean these areas. Dust, wipe, and freshen up with a spray of water and lemon essential oil.
Laundry Areas
Another neglected area tends to be the laundry room or space. We like to clean the actual machines, including the interiors. Easily accomplished with some all purpose cleaner, be sure to remove any dirt or hair buildup on or in the washer and dryer. Also, we like to move the appliances to get under and on the sides of them and sweep away all of the dirt that accumulates over time.
Do Plants Need To Be Cleaned?
Plant leaves and holders can have dust and dirt buildup on them. A gently dusting of leaves with a feather duster usually does the trick for bringing out the green.
Don’t Forget Carpets
At times, we may be asked to do a professional carpet cleaning is a good idea for not only freshening up the space, but for eliminating odors or allergens that could bother potential buyers.
Air It Out
After all of this cleaning is finished, open all the windows to air out the house before potential buyers come through. You will want to make sure that the house smells fresh and some people may find the smell of cleaning products too strong.
A little elbow grease goes a long way in making your home look its best. Buyers will appreciate it too!
Open House
A decluttered, depersonalized, and deep cleaned home will go beyond curb appeal, and when buyers walk through your front door with their real estate agent, a sale will be in the making.
We feel that if you take these steps to prepare and make your home appealing to buyers interested in putting their own stamp on a space, your property will go from For Sale to Sold in no time!
Prepare your home, book a pre-sale listing deep cleaning with MaidxChange now!
