Selling your home is a huge task to take on. You have to wait until it is the best time for you to list your house for sale, both for market timing and your family’s needs. When it is finally time, you need a credible real estate gent with experience working in residential neighborhoods like your own. Once you find an agent, you have to settle on a competitive price, have professional listing photos taken, and go through with everything you need to do to promote your house both off and online.
Staging a Home to Sell
Once your house is finally on the market, there are two main things you want. You want to get as much as you can for the property, and you want it to spend as little time on the market as possible. To make these two things happen, your home needs to be as appealing as possible to potential buyers. Real estate agents help homeowners with this through a process called home staging. Staging is the term used to describe all the ways we clean up, repair, and style our homes to appeal to the masses. While your realtor can help with a lot of your staging woes, there is one big thing you can do to get a headstart on the whole process: a deep, deep clean.
A lot of people choose to hire a housekeeper to deep clean their homes as a form of staging. If you want to save your dollars for moving expenses, detailing the house yourself isn’t out of the question. All it takes is the time and determination to do it right. Well, that and the necessary cleaning agents.
Tips for the Cleanest House Ever
You already know how to vacuum, how to wipe windows without leaving streaks, and how to dust bookshelves… there’s no need for a tutorial when it comes to that. However, when your house is on the market, people will be looking at the nitty gritty details of your property trying to find something wrong. If you want to impress even the most uptight type A people, use these tips on how to get the cleanest home possible:
- Get stains out of carpets by dousing with a solution of one part white vinegar and two parts water. Place a damp rag over the area, and place a hot iron over the rag to steam. Repeat until the stain lifts out of the carpet.
- Clean grout with laundry stain remover. Remove oily stains from upholstery with liquid dish soap.
- Use your vacuum handle attachment to clean dust out of vents. Take the vent covers off with a screwdriver, and hose them off outside. Once they are back on, you can wax them with car wax to help prevent dust from building up for the short run.
- Get a clean oven with baking soda, dishwasher liquid, and white vinegar. If your stove has a gas range, remove built-up food from stove grates with ammonia and wax to prevent build-up from coming back. Baking soda and hydrogen peroxide are perfect for cleaning glass-top stoves.
- Descale faucets in the kitchen and bathroom by tying a plastic baggy full of white vinegar on the faucet head. Let the scaly area soak in the vinegar for 10-20 minutes, then wipe with a rag or paper towel.
When you put your home on the market, you do everything you can to make sure it appeals to as many people as possible. There are tons of DIY staging projects out there, but the one thing every homeowner can do to help prepare their house for viewings is giving it the deep clean it deserves. Beyond your normal vacuuming and dusting, a deep clean involves getting to all those areas you don’t think about in your day-to-day life. These are the spots inquisitive home viewers will check, so you want to make sure they are impressed when they do.
