5 Things You Should Do Before You Sell Your House

If you’re trying to learn how to sell a house fast in a slow market, it can be surprising how much small changes can affect the way potential buyers see your house. We decided to test the waters by putting our house up for sale before our original timeline of Summer 2021. It can be hard to know how to go about safely offering open houses with all that is going on. Crazy research and action steps before our house hit the market, so I will be sharing our experience in a few different posts, hoping they will help you avoid some mistakes we made. Here are 5 Things You Should Do Before Selling Your House.

This post contains affiliate links and I may make some money, if you decide to buy one of the items listed, but as usual, all opinions are my own.

5 Things You Should Do Before You Sell Your House

Clean Up

In order to sell our home and minimize the moving costs, we decided to order a dumpster to remove clutter on a deadline and throw away things we no longer use or need.

Here’s how most dumpsters work:

I called a couple different dumpster companies and they basically have the same rates, but I chose to use a company I had referrals from friends, to avoid the trap of paying more at the end.

The Dumpster arrived as agreed and we had 10 days to sink or swim. They would charge us $10.00 per day after that, not a big deal, but what I really loved was that I had a deadline to get rid of stuff.

I started before the dumpster arrived, putting items on our local Buy Nothing group and donating to organizations.

When the dumpster arrived, we moved on to BIG items first! Tackling Attic, Garage and Basement as focus points.

I could not believe at the end, with all the items that went to donation, how much stuff we threw away in the dumpster.

It felt good to finally see my home free of clutter we didn’t even know we had!

Closet Clean Up

I looked at my closets and decided to donate 40-50% and anything I didn’t love that I hadn’t used in the past 2 years.

My closets went from this:

To This:

I also used the The Home Edit Method and did a closet makeover not having to spend much!

You can read about The Home Edit Method HERE.

Love seeing my sweaters on my winter closet layered up in rainbow mode!

My goal when I finished was to make sure I maintained them being organized to avoid going back on the trap!

Three months after the makeover, my closets still look clean and organized!

I also decided not to buy much during the house sale time, facilitated by Stay At Home With Covid.

Clean The Pantry

I needed to hit refresh to lose the weight I put on with Covid!

You can read about my changes HERE.

So I removed and cleaned my pantry!

I will share more on my pantry makeover soon!

But The biggest makeover was in my home gym/junk room!

Minor Updates Go A Long Way

Painting

Painting is something I strongly suggest.

Very inexpensive, if you can do it yourself, painting walls and baseboards is a great way to hit refresh on an old looking home!

We used the Spring to do that, while we’re still working on it, we tackled a few big parts of the house and it has made a HUGE difference!

Deck Project

We chose a waterproof seal with color to increase the chances that our deck will last years to come for whomever buys our beautiful home!

We power washed the deck to make the wood ready to receive the paint!

You would be surprised how inexpensive it is to buy a POWER WASHER!

Before

After

You can read about the largest project HERE.

Also we the renewed the entrance to the basement – an area often overlooked.

I wish I had taken a picture of how bad that area looked before the makeover.

We applied brand new waterproof sheetrock, painted the walls, painted the steps and applied a rug step for a finished look & replaced the threshold (bottom board that leads to the outside) that was old and falling apart:

I will share more details on each project soon!

This is just a taste!

Stay Tuned!

The following is just a to-do list we had, so you can check it out!

We bought our supplies at Home Depot, we’ll be sharing products for each project soon!

Carpet Cleaning

Another minor upgrade is shampooing the carpet!

If you have a great carpet cleaning device as we do, take one day at a time to do the whole house! If you don’t, you can look for professional carpet cleaning services near you to get the task done.

Nothing better than a clean carpet!

Here is our carpet cleaner: Bissel Pet Pro :

While you’re at it, why not clean the couch or large chairs as well?

Cabinet Cleaning

A very important action was to create room in our cabinets, so they didn’t look cluttered and a big mess.

I removed some items and took to the attic for storage, donated mugs and water bottles and bought cabinet organizers to help with this task.

I bought some lazy-suzans for oils and medicine:

Lazy Suzan

I’m still working on organizing the downstairs bathroom to remove our medicine items out of the kitchen.

After all, we should only have kitchen items in the kitchen, right?

Deep Cleaning

A clean house is a great start for prospective buyers!

So I took a few days using magic eraser on the walls and baseboards.

Also cleaned each floor in a more meticulous way and bought an indoor crate to limit my dogs access to some areas of the house to make sure it would stay clean. (They get plenty of exercise during our walks! )

Staging

After 2 months of ins and outs and all the above, we finally looked at the spaces and did minor staging.

We removed some bookshelves, moved some furniture around and used some minor decor upgrades to make the house stand out!

Here are some rooms we did some staging in.

Small budget, just a few touches and furniture reorganization:

We have a new list for 2021!

Stay tuned for step by step of the projects above and new list we’ll be tackling this year!

I hope my post not only helps you save money and prevent headaches but also eases you into having your beautiful home shine before the first open house!

Can’t wait to hear what you think about the 5 Things You Should Do Before You Sell Your House.

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