Here’s How Self Storage Can Help You Stage Your Home for Sale
Staging your home for sale is all about making it look pleasing for potential buyers. You want them to imagine themselves living in your house or condo to visualize how good it will feel to relax in the living room, work in the office, cook in the kitchen, eat in the dining room, and snooze in the bedroom.
If they picture it as a home, they’re more likely to decide to purchase it.
A cluttered home isn’t attractive to buyers. Even if you keep your home perfectly clean all the time, chances are you have accumulated things that are cluttering your home.
Let’s explore how decluttering can help you stage your home.
Decluttering for Home Staging
Your goal, when decluttering to stage your home, is to help people imagine themselves living in it. That means removing personalization. You’ll need to take down family photos, most of your hobby items and nicknacks that define you, and anything that isn’t generic.
You may find this tough and upsetting, but look at it this way, it will give you a better chance of selling your home.
If you don’t already have a self storage unit, we recommend renting one for these items. Our size guide can help you pick the right sort, but for most people, we suspect your personalized items will fit in a 5’x5’ or 5’x10’ unit.
To make sure those things remain in the best condition, consider also renting a unit with climate control.
Do a Deep Clean
After getting rid of things you don’t need, and putting personal displays and decorations away, it’s time to do a deep clean of your home.
Your real estate agent may recommend hiring a professional cleaning service, and we also think this is a good idea. However, you can get the cleaning started and have them do the detail work.
Organize your home by putting everything in its place. Put books on shelves and organize them by subject and author. Hang up your tea cups, stack your plates by type, clear your tables and counters, hang your coats in your closet, and so on.
Also, vacuum and shampoo your carpets, sweep and mop your floors, wash your walls and windows, and dust everywhere. As mentioned, you can hire a cleaning service to handle these tasks, or do them yourself and have a cleaning service finish up. It can help to have professionals come in to make sure your place looks perfect.
So, to stage your home for sale, always start with decluttering. It will make the following steps easier and even benefit you when you move into your new home.
General Decluttering
General decluttering differs from decluttering for staging, and it’s something you should do periodically when you move into your new home.
This type of decluttering is all about going through your stuff, sorting out the things you don’t need, and getting rid of them. Sell things that are especially valuable, donate things that are in gently used condition but that might be hard to sell, recycle what you can, and throw away the rest.
You’ll want to tackle this in an organized way. Pick a room, then pick one part of the room. You could declutter the clothes in your dresser first, then the hanging clothes in the closet. Next, you might go over your bookshelves and get rid of books you know you’ll never read or reference again. By dealing with one section and one type of item at a time, you’ll avoid overwhelming yourself.
Next, get the stuff out of the house so you’re not tempted to go through it again. Thrift stores are your friends, as they’ll take a lot of items that are still in excellent condition. Also, you can include the value of the donations as line-item deductions on your taxes.
Decluttering is a smart thing to do before you move as well. You’ll end up having less to transport from one home to another, and you’ll really feel you’re getting a fresh start at your new place.
