Remove Excess Clutter and Furniture
Professional staging can have many advantages when selling your home. Many homes contain too much furniture. You may benefit from removing 2 to 3 pieces of furniture from each room. Less furniture will make the rooms appear bigger. You can pay about $100 a month to place the furniture into storage or simply stack it neatly in the garage for free.
- Remove all personal photographs from tables and walls. Patch holes in the walls or hang non-personalized artwork over the existing nails.
- Pack up your bookcases (you’re going to move anyway).
- Clean out the closets and store non-essential items.
- Rearrange your kitchen pantry, kitchen cabinets and bedroom closets in an orderly manner.
Thoroughly Clean the House Before Selling
You can hire a professional cleaning crew for about $300 or do it yourself for free. Be sure to wash the inside of the windows.
- Rent a carpet steamer and clean the carpets. You may find they do not need to be replaced.
- Dust the tops of your doorways and window frames.
- Polish all wood / ceramic flooring.
- Wash all light fixture coverings and ceiling fan blades.
- To give your home a more open feeling, consider removing a few doors that open into each other or otherwise block the flow of traffic.
Updating the Kitchen on a Budget
Kitchens are the most important room in the house. It’s the heart and soul of the home. Even if a buyer is not much of a cook, the kitchen is still where family and friends tend to gather.
- If new granite is out of your budget, consider either re-grouting the kitchen counter tiles, which is surprisingly cost effective, or covering them with granite tiles instead of granite slab.
- For wood cabinets, stripping the finish and re-staining or painting will save you more money than re-surfacing the cabinets.
- Buy new knobs and / or pulls for the cabinet doors. If you have 40 or so knobs on your kitchen cabinet, at a cost of about $5 per knob, your total outlay for new hardware will be about $200. New hardware will transform the appearance of your cabinets.
- Replace a worn kitchen faucet for about $100 to $200.
- Buy new kitchen sink basket strainers for less than $25 each.
- Consider installing kitchen pendant lights over the sink. Cost: About $500.
