Decluttering Your House for Sale

When getting ready to put your house on the market, the best place to start is to rid the house of clutter.  For most people, everything in your home has a purpose and a place, and it can be quite hard trying to decipher what you can do without during the duration of the sale of your home.  Packing away those extra items can be an inconvenience, but let’s face it, nothing about moving is going to be easy.

What buyers want to see is floor space, wall space and counter space.  Removing anything that absolutely does not have to be there, is tremendously helpful in creating the visual the buyers are looking for.  This means clearing the small appliances off the kitchen counter, the products off the bathroom sink and removing small items of furniture that really don’t serve much of a purpose.

Yes, it will be difficult to decide what needs to be removed.  It may be frustrating not having everything handy, but it will be worth it.  Your moving anyway, you may as well get started packing!  Be brutal.  Take a step back and seriously assess what you can do without for a few weeks.  Nothing is too small to make a difference.

When considering decluttering your house for sale, do not ignore taking down your personal items.  This goes beyond just packing up the the family photos.  Remove awards, diplomas and anything else that has your picture or name on it.  Completely depersonalize the home.

Historically, the reason for depersonalizing  is so that it makes it easier for the potential buyers to visualize themselves in the home.  I do agree with this.  However, it goes beyond creating an atmosphere that is conducive to the buyers imagination.  I’m talking about privacy.

It may simply be human nature, but people are nosy.  They look at your pictures, read your diplomas and basically create a storyboard in their mind of who you and your family are.  This may seem harmless, but it’s what happens next that you want to be aware of.

If your home is the one they are considering buying, they will go home and google you.  They will pull up your social media accounts and yes, sometimes even base their offer on what they see displayed in those accounts!  They will see you vacationing on some island and then decide that if you can afford that trip, you can afford to accept an offer that is below your asking price.

I have seen this too many times to count.  They take a mental snapshot of your name, and go home and start their research.  So, don’t make it easy.  Don’t have your name on display in the home.  In fact, I would even suggest that you may want to consider setting all your social media accounts on “private” during the duration of the sale.

But let’s get back to clutter.  The word clutter actually implies chaos and disorder.  So you are going to remove any and all unnecessary items, pack away personal items, then what?  Look at the flow of the rooms.  They may be set up in a manner that adds comfort and ease to your life, but if you move things around a bit, perhaps it can open the space up a bit more.  If you have to walk around furniture moving from one room to the next, fix that.  Make sure the flow makes sense.

In the end, the best advice really is, start packing.  If it’s valuable to you, pack it.  If you can live without it, pack it.  If it basically does nothing more than look pretty and collect dust, pack it.  If it has your name or picture on it, pack it. You’ll see all those items again, and when the real packing starts, you will be quite glad that you had already gotten a head start!