Is your clutter stopping you from selling your home?
When you’ve lived in your house for a long time, it’s normal for clutter to accumulate. But how does this affect buyers? First, potential buyers need to be able to visualize themselves in your home, and it’s hard to do that when the house looks visually busy and full of personal items.
So if you want to sell faster, you need to declutter your home. But where should you start? What areas of your home are important? Read on to find out.
Why Declutter Your Home Before Selling?
Want to sell your home faster? Having less stuff cluttered around your home makes it appear larger than it is, making it more appealing to the eyes of your buyers.
It also depersonalizes your home so prospective buyers can visualize themselves in the space living their day-to-day lives. When the house is full of personal pictures and trinkets, it inhibits the buyer’s imagination and makes them less likely to see themselves living there.
With fewer items in a room, especially large furniture items, rooms smell cleaner, and the air is clearer. It becomes easier to infuse fragrance into rooms to give buyers a pleasant and welcoming experience.
You’ll find that your home is easier to clean with less clutter too, making it much faster to prepare for viewings. Any potential problems or damages will be revealed when you start to declutter and move furniture around, allowing you to fix these and increase the value of your home.
Benefits of Decluttering
When you declutter your home, you’ll discover some unexpected benefits. Ever heard the saying messy bed, messy head? A cluttered space makes it hard to think clearly, and can actually be damaging to mental health.
With a clean and clear space, you’ll have less anxiety, and it will be easier to focus and be productive. Your family will benefit from this too, as it will also reduce stress and tension for other people in the household.
Organizing your belongings will help you to emotionally move out. You’ll process the transition better as you slowly see rooms start to empty while you’re decluttering. You’ll discover lost items and treasures you forgot you had, allowing you to re-experience the beautiful memories you had with your family in your home.
It also helps in being prepared for moving into your next home. Don’t carry the burden of clutter and things you don’t need with you. Sort it out now to avoid letting clutter build up in your new place.
Where to Start: Getting Organized
It might feel overwhelming thinking about how to declutter your home, especially if you’ve lived in your home for years and experienced multiple life changes there.
Pick any place to start, and remember there is no right or wrong. There are many different ways to declutter and think about your items, but it comes down to what feels good to you.
Regardless of which approach you take, eventually, your items will need to be sorted into 4 different categories: things you want to keep, things to throw, things to sell or give to charity, and things you would like to put in storage.
Avoid trying to organize or keep any clutter if you forgot you had it; that means you don’t need it! When it comes to putting things in storage, try to only store things you fully intend to use or sell in the near future; otherwise, your storage will become the new clutter zone.
Make Decluttering Fun
Always keep it fun and light! It’s only a chore if you let it be a chore.
While you declutter, you can listen to music or use wireless earbuds to chat with your friends. Try gamifying the decluttering! Reward yourself for achievements, set challenges for yourself, and let it be fun!
You can even involve your family and friends in the decluttering process and have a swapping or selling party, or just recruit them in helping you get organized.
Staging a Home: The Basics
Staging a home means taking the necessary steps to make your home presentable and attractive to prospective buyers. There are typically 4 key elements of staging, and these need to be done in every room of the house, and both inside and outside.
The first step is to declutter. Before you can think about doing anything else, there needs to be physical space cleared to see any work that needs to be done to the home.
Once your home is clutter free, it will become a lot easier to clean your home. In terms of cleaning tips, check out a spring-cleaning checklist to make sure all bases are covered. You could also hire cleaners that specialize in cleaning houses for moving.
Step 3 is to depersonalize. Remove any photographs, traces of personal hobbies, and anything you’ve collected over the years.
Then finally, it’s time to redecorate and style. Repaint over any bright accent walls or bold colors, and make sure your home looks neutral and appealing to all types of people. Always fix any noticeable cosmetic damages like visible holes in the wall.
Building Curb Appeal
Remember that the exterior of your house is just as important as the interior, if not more so. There’s only one chance to make a first impression, and that’s what the exterior of your home is for buyers. This includes the front garden, back garden, and exterior walls and roofing.
Similar to hiring a cleaner to support you, gardeners are on hand to help, too, even if you only hire them once or twice a month. Always keep the lawn mowed, remove all weeds, and keep any shrubs tidy and under control.
Never underestimate the power of a clean roof. A roof free of dirt and debris gives your house the perfect home vibes. We recommend bringing in a roof inspector if you haven’t had your roof looked at for over two years.
Home Office and Documents
When it comes to your home office, only keep the essentials. Get rid of things like stationery that is pretty but unfunctional and any loose items in your drawers.
Have you ever considered going paperless? Most documentation is handled online these days anyway, and digitizing everything could save you a lot of storage space and time in the future. Plus, avoiding printing things is great for the environment!
Shred any documents you never look at. Most documents that are over a year old such as bank statements, payslips, and bills, will never be useful. They’re just taking up physical and mental space that could be saved.
Reorganize everything you choose to keep into categories that are useful for you moving forward, and make sure everything is clearly labeled.
Kitchen and Dining Room
If you are someone who finds yourself always buying the latest kitchen gadgets, it’s time to get honest with yourself about what you actually use. When was the last time you used the blender? The air fryer? That breadmaker you told yourself you needed?
Another common cause of clutter in the kitchen is duplicated items or having an excessive amount of one thing. You don’t need 5 spatulas. And are you reading all of those cookbooks?
Ignore what you feel like you’re supposed to have and focus on what you actually use and find valuable day-to-day. Finally, remove anything that doesn’t belong in the kitchen, like the ominous junk drawer if you have one.
The Living Room
A cause of cluttered living rooms is an excess of furniture, which makes the room look unnecessarily busy. What furniture are you using, and what could you declutter?
The living room is a crucial place for having a cohesive theme. Because it’s not only about physical clutter, it’s about visual clutter too. Having too many colors and too many different styles of decor can make a room look messy, even if it has very few items in it.
Storage solutions are another essential for this space. Think bookshelves for making books and decor look presentable and storage boxes or crates for toys and miscellaneous items.
Clothing and Closet
It’s time to think about what you actually wear. Clothes that are too small for you are only going to make you feel bad about yourself, and things that are too big aren’t flattering for your body. You may also have clothes and accessories that are for occasions that are no longer relevant, i.e., when was the last time you went to a black tie event?
Go through each item and ask yourself: when did I last wear this, do I love it, and is it functional or multipurpose?
Having wardrobes and closets that look clutter-free helps potential buyers see the real size of the storage spaces. And its also a nice feeling to have a closet to be proud of and to not feel compelled to apologize for the clutter when you open a door.
Kids Bedrooms
Everything in the previous closet section applies to your kids too, but the main thing here is toys. The trick to this is thinking about what your kids still play with vs what they have grown out of. It may help to involve them in this process and allow them to be a part of those choices.
Depending on your situation, the clutter here might just be a case of needing better storage solutions to keep toys organized rather than throwing out a lot of things.
Remember that in house viewings people might want to use your kid’s bedrooms for other purposes like a home office or a home gym. So the more you can help them visualize that, the more likely they are to be interested in your home.
The Bathroom
In the bathroom, try to keep visible toiletries to a minimum when you have a house viewing. Utilize storage space and make sure counter space is as clear as possible.
Think about what things you would like to take when you move house and what things you would like to declutter. Remember here that most toiletries have a 12-month expiry date, so throw out anything that may have expired.
Similar to in the kitchen, remove any duplicates like multiple body lotions. Consider what you use on a regular basis, and ditch everything else because it’s just adding unnecessary clutter.
Check the appearance of your towels, bathmats, and shower curtain. If these look old, replace them. These are cheap to replace and make a huge difference to how your bathroom presents in a viewing.
Loft and Garage
It’s tempting to simply move all of your house clutter into the loft or garage, but don’t forget this still needs to be cleared out before you move. So it might as well be decluttered too.
These spaces are key selling points for buyers because they can be converted into many other things. If they’re bogged down with clutter, it’s not a good look.
If you need organization tips, ask yourself these questions for every item in your loft or garage: how long have I been storing this for? If I keep this, when am I going to use it or sell it? If you have been storing something for over a year and you have no plan for when you need it, that’s a sign it needs to go.
Decluttering for Selling
If you’re selling, it’s time to declutter your home. It will help you keep the place clean and maintained, make the place look appealing to prospective buyers, and help you prepare for moving to your new place.
At We Buy Memphis Houses, we help you to get a cash offer on your home fast. Contact us today to find out how.