When preparing your house for sale when moving to another home, you’ll often find it necessary to make specific changes in both the interior and exterior of the house in order to make its best features stand out. Also known as home staging, it is a must-do task designed to make your home more appealing to a broader base of potential home buyers.
When done properly, preparing a house for sale will have a number of indisputable advantages:
- it will become more appealing to buyers,
- it will sell faster; and
- it will sell for a higher price.
As a homeowner, you can choose to hire a professional stager but that decision will cost you – anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. Or you can also choose to save that serious amount of money by completing by yourself the task of preparing your house for sale.
Take advantage of the following checklist to prepare your house for sale:
Make necessary repairs
First of all, the house will need to be in great shape to sell fast and for top dollar. And that practically means taking care of all repairs that need to be made on the house – either by yourself (whenever possible) or hiring a qualified person to do them for you.
Check the following areas in your house and fix them or have them fixed before listing your home for sale when moving away:
- Roof damage of any kind;
- Loose or broken tiles;
- Cracked or broken windows;
- Plumbing issues – leaking faucets or toilets, broken pipes, etc.;
- Burned-out bulbs in light fixtures;
- Squeaky doors, windows, and drawers;
- Holes and markings on the walls or floors;
- Household appliances that are out of order.
By law, the seller is required to inform the buyer of any known physical problems with the house before the sale is finalized. So, to make your house more appealing to buyers, you just have to address any major and even not-so-major problems, if any.
Consult this: Moving Timeline: Interactive week by week moving checklist
Declutter the interior space
What to do to prepare your house for sale before you move out? The next step is to declutter the interior space so that potential buyers can focus on the house instead of the possible clutter inside it.
In other words, decluttering simply means getting rid of any useless items inside the home:
- Clear the kitchen and bathroom countertops;
- Organize all cabinets and remove anything that doesn’t need to be there;
- Organize closets and remove any unneeded clothes;
- Pack away your books in small cardboard boxes;
- Remove any knick-knacks – either pack them away in boxes for the upcoming move or throw them away.
Also, consider de-personalizing the interior of your house by removing and packing away any family photos from walls or on top of furniture. All that should make it easier for homebuyers to imagine living in the house and you’ll have your framed photos and pictures already packed for moving.
See also: How to declutter your home before moving
Clean up your home
One of the cheapest ways to prepare a house for sale is to clean it so that its interior gets to be more welcoming and pleasant for future owners. In fact, the fresh and spotless clean look of your house will increase substantially its charm, thus boosting the chances of a quick and profitable sale.
- Clean up any dirty and grimy areas from the kitchen and bathrooms;
- Dust all furniture pieces inside the house;
- Dust and clean all light fixtures. Remove possible dead bugs from the ceiling lamps;
- Remove any cobwebs;
- Wash all windows from inside and outside, plus all mirrors within the house;
- Vacuum all carpets and mop all non-carpeted floors. If needed, have the carpets cleaned professionally;
- Use air fresheners or scented candles to freshen up the air, if needed.
Must-read: Moving-out Cleaning Checklist
Boost your home’s curb appeal
Of course, preparing your house for sale when moving is not in any way limited to its interior. Bear in mind that the outside of a house is very important too because that’s what people see first and what will prompt them to form their first impressions of your property.
And when staging a home before a move, first impressions matter more than you think. An appealing house exterior will invite buyers to cross the threshold and take a look at its exterior, and vice versa – an unappealing one will drive people away without even setting a foot inside.
So, how to prepare a house for sale? Boost its curb appeal:
- Mow the lawn and trim the hedges (bushes);
- Remove dead branches from the trees;
- Clean walkways and driveways of debris – fallen leaves, branches
- Fix any broken parts of the fence;
- Clean and oil rusty and squeaky gate hinges;
- Plant pretty flowers in pots or in the ground to beautify the entire house yard.
Interesting info: 11 Signs it’s time to move to a new city
Final tips for preparing a house for sale
Our checklist for preparing a house for sale will end with some final advice on the best way to stage your home before moving away.
- Invite a few friends over to your house and ask them to do you a favor: to go through the home as if they were potential buyers and then share with you what they like and what they don’t like about the property. That way, you’ll get valuable feedback from your pals that should help you prepare your home for sale in the best possible way.
- Visit, if possible at all, other homes in the neighborhood for possible ideas about how to improve the look of your own property.
- Keep valuables – both personal items and expensive household items such as art pieces – with you or store them away in a safe place. It’s possible that some ill-intended people use the home showings as an opportunity to mark a potential hit target later on. That rarely happens but it’s still a possibility, so beware of such suspicious activity. Also, allow visitors to leave the house only from one door.
The task of preparing a house for sale should not be underestimated as its successful completion will make your house move much easier and less stressful. And in case you feel that staging your house for moving takes up too much of your time and energy, then do consider hiring professional movers to help you pack and move your belongings once you’re ready to move out.
