4 Simple Ways to Get a Family Home Ready for Sale in Southwest Florida
by: Kristin Louis (ParentingWithKris.com)
Getting a home ready for sale with a family can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are some simple things you can do to get your house sold in no time. If you’re having a little trouble figuring things out at the beginning, here are some tips to give you a head start.
Remove the Clutter
The first step to getting your house ready for sale is removing the clutter.
By definition, clutter is anything you have that no longer serves a purpose or that you haven’t used in a while.
To declutter your house efficiently, you must create a plan to tackle each room. This should include going through each room to determine what you should keep, donate, or discard.
The bedroom closets are a good example; you can arrange your clothing in piles that will help you sort them. Since you have children, it can be difficult to take the time to declutter, but Clean Mama has some good advice for getting your kids involved in the decluttering process.
With babies, your only option is to work while they’re asleep, but children as young as 4 can help you declutter if you point them in the right direction. Also, make sure you structure activities in a way that accounts for their attention spans and levels of exhaustion.
Get Your Family Home Ready For Sale in Southwest Florida!
Stash the Personal Stuff
Removing personal items and features that have your personal touch is known as depersonalization, and you can accomplish this by removing personal items like photo collections, odd furniture, and busy wallpaper.
Smaller items can be placed away from the buyers’ prying eyes, but larger ones may have to be put in storage.
If you have any brightly painted walls — even in the kids’ rooms — these need to be repainted using neutral colors.
According to Clever, some of the popular paint color choices in 2019 are grey-blue in the kitchen he outside of your house could also benefit from a change using a mixture of gray and beige.
Make the House Pretty
While there are some basic essentials to staging a home, HomeAdvisor states that your real estate agent is the best person to give guidance on how other sellers staged their house before putting it up for sale.
The agent will be able to give you an objective opinion on what you’ve done and how to proceed.
This article also gives some good tips on how to stage your home.
You should remove any baby gear as well as anything bearing your kids’ names.
For the kids’ rooms, you should keep the bare essentials in the room, such as twin beds and dressers, but avoid decorating for a particular gender or putting in a kid-oriented theme.
You can allow the kids to keep their favorite toys, but all the others should be packed away.
Put on a Show
Now that you’ve put in the hard work to get the house ready, you’ll need to maintain it.
This won’t be easy with kids, but there are a few clever ways you can keep the house intact.
One of the suggestions is creating a designated junk spot. By doing this, the kids can still move around, but you stop them from littering their things all over the house.
This makes clean-up much easier for open houses or tours.
You can also put small bags in high-traffic rooms for trash collection.
You can then easily place the trash bags into the bin whenever necessary.
At the time of an open house or tour, you should take a final walkthrough of the house to remove toys and other clutter from countertops.
It’s best if you take the kids out of the house to the park or the movies while the real estate agent is wooing the potential buyers.
When you have kids, it can be difficult to get — and keep — your house in order, especially when it comes time to sell. However, with a few quick tricks, you can get your kids to pitch in with decluttering activities and sell your house quickly.