Getting Ready to Sell Your Home? Great!
It’s time to prepare your property for the market and Extra Room Self Storage have compiled some simple steps to help sell your home…
We’ve included everything to help make the sale process as quick and stress free as possible. There’s clear, straightforward tips as well as affordable storage options to support you.
Tips to Make Your Home More Desirable…
Home buying is an emotional experience. It is not just about location and appearance, it is about, ‘feel’ – many buyers will say they need their potential new home to ‘feel right’ so engaging with ‘the senses’ is part of this. It‘s why professional home staging as a service has become so popular, many such experts having a background in interior design.
However, you don’t have to get a home staging expert in if you don’t want to, because there are a few tricks of the trade that can make a really big difference.
Declutter, Tidy Up, Clean, Remove / Store Away Personal Items
Treat the selling of your home as a project. And as with any project, start by getting organised. It’s the perfect time for a clear out of overloaded shelves, wardrobes, cupboards, home office desks. We are talking about a thorough declutter!
A good trick for decluttering is to take three sacks or removal boxes and label them, KEEP, BIN and CHARITY, because it focuses the mind on exactly what you want to do with your possessions.
Whilst shelves are clear and cupboards are empty, use the time to clean those nooks and crannies that you can’t normally reach. The most important factor of all for viewings is having a clean and tidy home.
Potential buyers do not want to look at cluttered rooms, so try to minimalize decorative items on windowsills and shelves. Keep the top of kitchen units as clear as possible.
Decluttering helps rooms to appear more spacious and inviting. Focus on the high-traffic areas first, such as your hallway, kitchen and living area. This doesn’t mean you have strip everything bare, a few well-positioned accessories, are certainly required to make the property look ‘homely’.
Home staging experts also advise on the de-personalising of properties, which means temporarily putting away or removing family photographs, children’s artwork or anything of a personal or potentially controversial nature.
A clean, staged, decluttered home sells faster and for a higher price.
- Top Tip: If you don’t want to part with items and haven’t got space to neatly store them at home, household self storage is a perfect short term solution for decluttering your home, making it feel more spacious and starting the moving process.
DIY, Repairs and General Property Maintenance
Before people start viewing your home, carry out any basic repairs. It is time to deal with any wallpaper hanging off the walls, touch up paintwork where necessary, make sure doors aren’t coming off their hinges, and where possible repair visible damage to any fixtures and fittings.
You want to make the house feel ‘loved’ and ‘cared for’, as this will make a positive impression during viewings. If you love your home, so might they!
- Top Tip: If you are using tradespeople for the first time, do some research and get customer feedback and ratings if you can. If you need to temporarily clear rooms for DIY and maintenance projects, self storage can be a handy service to use.
Choose Neutral Colour Schemes
This certainly doesn’t have to be beige and boring! We all have our own colour preferences when it comes to paint, but just because that trendy shade of deep pink works for you, don’t presume it has the same effect on others!
Decorating your home in neutral, or more muted tones, is often the safer option – creams, soft taupe and mushroom shades, and other soft colours such as pale green, pale grey and off-white work well. Home staging experts recommend, if you can, that you carry a base theme colour or complimenting tones of a specific colour, throughout the home “to connect each room”.
Overall, presenting a neutral canvas in your home gives potential buyers a blank slate. It leaves room for their imagination. This encourages mental ownership and hopefully propels them to take actual ownership!
- Top Tip: When choosing a paint colour always take into consideration natural light, which will help you know when to use cool or warm tones. The type of artificial lighting will also affect how colours appear. Click here to see Dulux’s handy guide on this.
Add Appealing Accessories for those Finishing Touches
Interior designers often like to use a range of textures and this can be especially effective when adding interest to neutral colour schemes. Think cushions, throws, lampshades, rugs, flowers, candles. This is where touches of colour can also be introduced effectively too. If walls look bare (because you have removed the family portrait!) replace it with some alternative artwork, such as a canvas or framed print. These accessories certainly do not have to be expensive to be effective.
Neutralising the interior makes it easier for prospective buyers to visualise their own possessions in the house you are selling. It also gives the illusion of more space. Buyers need to picture themselves living in your home.
- Top Tip: Interior designers always prefer to group ornaments in odd numbers, e.g. 3s or 5s. They also like symmetry so that is why a fireplace looks more balanced if using two matching candlesticks, or two matching ornaments or vases of flowers, either side.
Make the Great Outdoors, Great ….
It’s easy to have tunnel vision, focussing on the inside of the home ready for viewings – sometimes to the detriment of getting patios and gardens in order.
Just as the inside of the house should be tidy, decluttered and cared for, so should the garden, driveway, garage and any other outbuilding.
Think of it as outdoor living space, which is the philosophy that garden designers adopt for their projects. Clear away children’s outdoor toys, mow the lawn, repair any damaged fence panels etc.
- Top Tip: If you haven’t got storage space in your garage or garden shed, then consider using temporary self storage for garden furniture, garden tools and equipment that you don’t regularly use, or children’s outdoor toys. At Extra Room Self Storage, you have a key to your own unit, and are free to access your possessions 365 days of the year so they’re easy to retrieve if you need anything.
Create a Welcoming Ambience
Finally, let’s go back to our original statement about a ‘house feeling right’. That is why creating a welcoming ambience that engages all the senses is the lynchpin to clinching that all-important house sale.
We have talked about making the home visually appealing, but we also need to think about how the house smells, how the house feels, and how the house sounds. Smell is really important. Any musty, damp unpleasant smells need to be banished, such as in bathrooms, utility rooms and so on.
Naturally scented candles and diffusers work well (the emphasis being on natural and subtle). Plug in and spray air fresheners can be far too overpowering and even provoke allergic reactions.
In the kitchen, the smell of coffee brewing or breadmaking is a well-documented trick, but it can really evoke a welcoming sense through smell. Any lingering smells from “last night’s takeaway” will not be at all enticing, so make sure the kitchen has been well aired and free of cooking odours, or over-ripe smelly fruit in a fruit bowl!
Remove any pet bedding if it overpowers a room, and on that subject, where possible keep pets out of the way during viewings. Not everyone loves pets, so it is always wise to be mindful of this.
Make sure the house is a comfortable temperature too, turn the heating on if it’s a colder day but don’t get the temperature too high that the house becomes stuffy.
- Top Tip: A calming ambience creates a welcoming atmosphere, which is always going to make your property a more attractive proposition.
We hope you find this advice helpful in selling your home. When it comes to preparing to sell your home, there’s a lot to consider, but Extra Room Self Storage is here to help. We provide household storage for Nuneaton, Tamworth, Hinckley and the surrounding areas. You can click on the following links to see more: