Prepping Your Home for Sale

First, you make the decision to sell your home. This decision is generally made after many thoughtful, analytical, and emotional conversations.

Then, you must determine whether to sell with or without a realtor’s assistance–another decision requiring careful consideration and reflective dialogue.

Then, if a realtor’s assistance is deemed necessary, the choice of an agent necessitates even more significant deliberation and attention.

Then, when to list, how and what to price, where to advertise… At this point in the process, you’ve most likely maximized your spreadsheet skills, exhausted your interviewing abilities, and depleted your social network’s knowledge of the listing process as well as its interest in your real estate state of affairs.

Don’t give yourself a virtual high-five quite yet, as you still have to sell the place!

And, to sell the place most likely means people you don’t know, people you might not like, people who have no real plan to buy, people who might or might not be able to afford your house are going to have to the opportunity to scrutinize your house, run their fingers across your furniture, straighten your artwork, criticize your paint choices, crinkle their noses at your appliances, and whisper among themselves concerning your home’s cleanliness or lack thereof.

You, on the other hand, will have the opportunity to smile, nod, and politely acknowledge any pearls of home interior design and exterior ornamentation wisdom without losing your cool or justifying your choice of mint green walls in your youngest child’s bedroom.

To avoid jail time for assault of that particularly obnoxious potential homebuyer (the one arriving without an appointment and without the prerequisite financing preapproval but with the fastidious mother-in-law in tow), consider preparing and showcasing your home, aka “staging,” to eliminate the more egregious visuals.

Staging a home can involve the little things, such as removing the Disney stickers from the bathroom mirrors and pulling last year’s Halloween décor from the front lawn, as well as the big, such as knuckling down and detaching three years of school artwork from the refrigerator and cabinets in close proximity.

Other suggestions that come to mind for home- (and potentially self-) improvement could include:

• investing in matching bath and hand towels
• the implementation of a hamper for dirty clothes
• recycling the pile of biodegrading dry cleaning bags stuffed in the corner of your closet
• holding your nose and cleaning out the far reaches of the refrigerator
• applying some proverbial elbow grease to the light plate switches and door faces covered with those precious fingerprints
• packing away (just until the home sells!) any politically questionable (UFOs caught on camera during your last camping trip), geographically disdainful (“life’s too short to live in Dallas!”), religiously dubious paraphernalia (the dog nativity set could rub some potential buyers the wrong way)

After eradicating these obvious home-selling hurdles, noodle on the Home Staging 101 tips and advice provided by your home sales experts at MilitaryByOwner. Enjoy the show!