STAGING YOUR HOME FOR SELLING

When you are putting your house on the market, a key thing is Stage Your Home. An essential part of staging includes de-cluttering. You want to make your home look like a warm and inviting hotel. Start with this list below, and you will be on your way to staging your home in no time!

SORT
Be sure to have three things ready: a donation box, a garbage bag and a recycling bin. Go through your house systematically, room by room. Start putting likes with likes. For example, put clothes you are going to keep in one pile. If you have kids’ toys that are no longer used, put them in the donation box. Extra light bulbs that you’re not going to use in your new home can be recycled; see the following article for tips on how to recycle these and other items.

TOSS
Purge, Purge, and Purge! Now is the time to throw things away that can’t be recycled or donated! Liberate yourself from those bottles of shampoo that just have a smidgen left (I know you’ve got a few of these around in the shower!). If you have things lying around that haven’t been used in years, old stinky mops and multiple brooms: toss them. You’re not likely to use them in your new home and it’d be silly to move them. When you’re finished purging, take your garbage to the curb, so you don’t change your mind. Good Riddance!

Personal Photos – The key during a walk-through is to make potential buyers feel like they are living in their own home. Remember the idea is a hotel; there wouldn’t be pictures of other guests would there? To this end, take all your “making merry around the Christmas tree” and “bbq-ing in the backyard” photos and pack them up.

Closets – This is a perfect time to pack up seasonal clothing that you are not wearing and put it into plastic bins. Having a less cluttered closet will make it look bigger. And remember, people don’t want to see how you live, they want to imagine themselves living there; give them as tidy a palette as possible.

Collectibles – Go through your valued collectibles before you store them away. Maybe there are a handful you don’t like or need anymore. This may be an opportunity to give some items away, or sell them.

Counter tops – Be sure to keep counter tops clutter free. Everything should look streamlined and clean. This is the perfect time to figure out what you need on the counter tops and what you don’t. If some items are continuing to come back to haunt you, you probably need to rethink your set-up.

DONATE
Here are some general donation stations:
Goodwill donation center locator: http://www.seattlegoodwill.org/
Value Village donation center locator: http://tinyurl.com/38m37o
Shalom Bayit: http://www.ncjwseattle.org/DVproject.htm
Eyeglasses Stores: Many eye glass stores, and many drug stores, will gladly accept these donations for those who cannot afford glasses but desperately need them.
Doll museum – If you had a lot of dolls as a child and don’t want to just drop them off at the local donation station, this is a great place to take them. http://www.dollart.com/control.htm

SELLING
Think carefully about what you are attempting to sell. Is it really worth your time to sell the item?
Figure out how much the item may be worth before attempting to sell it. A good way to get an idea about how much you may get for an item is to visit www.eBay.com and look at the same item being sold by other people. I would suggest selling big ticket items, such as a 2 year-old refrigerator, or a really nice table saw. You may, however, want to re-think selling Barbie dolls that aren’t in their original box, as they don’t tend to bring in very much money. Think back to the SORTING phase, these Barbies may be a hot ticket donation item for some little girl who’s dying for a doll! If you don’t have a lot of time to mess around with the intricacies of online auctions, one option is to hire someone to sell on eBay for you like
http://www.i-soldit.com/index.asp; this company will sell your items for you, and send you a check or donate the proceeds from the sale to your favorite charity!