One important thing you can do to prepare your home is to get rid of clutter. A major contributor to a cluttered look is having too much furniture. Professional stagers often whisk away as much as half the owner's furnishings, and the house looks much bigger.
Clear out the over stuffed closets and storage rooms, sort through items to keep, toss, recycle, or donate them to charity. Then there are those knickknacks, numerous family photos, souvenirs, and other items scattered throughout. Pack up the items you plan to keep. You will need to pack anyway once your home sells.
The next step is to clean the whole house. Get into every nook, cranny, and corner of each room. Clean the base trim, corners, light switches, and door knobs extremely well. Buyers don't like to buy other peoples dust and dirt.
Go through your house and notice all the low-cost fixes or changes you could make that would appeal to a buyer: a new shower curtain, updated knobs on kitchen and bath cabinets, a new welcome mat by the front door, trimming or removing those overgrown shrubs along the front of the house, and so on.
Making a good first impression with a tidy exterior is important, but the interior of your home should be given just as much attention. Peeling paint inside your home will signify to buyers that you haven’t taken good care of the property and that there may be other problems lurking below the surface. Wallpaper usually turns potential buyers off as well, because it often features busy patterns and makes the house seem outdated.
