Spring cleaning is the perfect time to declutter your home and get organized, especially if you are planning to put your home up for sale during this spring selling season.
Decluttering can help you create a more peaceful and stress-free environment, while also making it easier to find what you need when you need it at any time, but even more importantly while you are attempting to ready your home for the market.
From storage solutions to tidying tips, here are some helpful ways to declutter your home and make it a more enjoyable place for you—and your potential home buyers.
1. Begin by approaching your own front door with fresh eyes. Sometimes people feel bogged down by the clutter and disrepair they have accumulated over the years and have to varying degrees “blindness” to it. To help break through this phenomenon, look at your home as if you are a forensics detective…stain on the porch, window screen missing, front door paint chipped off etc. Don’t personalize it, just note it in a list on your phone or on paper. It will become your master punch list, but don’t stress—a long list does NOT mean you must tackle ALL. More on that later in this post.
2. Once you are at your front door, imagine you are entering your home as an unannounced guest for the first time, where do your eyes gravitate to first? What aspect of your entryway or front rooms would jump out as “cluttered” or disorganized? Do you have too many coats, boots and shoes visible, stacks of mail and other papers piled up? Dog hair, dust bunnies and dirty windows? Don’t beat yourself up—just step back and notice the big picture and add items to your list.
3. Use this same fresh-eyed forensics detective approach to each room in your house. Try to not get bogged down (yet) with closets, cupboards and drawers— those are Phase 2 concerns. Look at your list for each room and prioritize and highlight all items that WILL make an immediate improvement and that you CAN tackle yourself.
4. Set aside a day or two to focus on your new list of highlighted items— immediate impact and do-able improvements. Once you have completed that list the visible results should serve to motivate you to go deeper into your punch list to begin to handle the additional items that need either more time, resources or consideration e.g. do you really need to get carpets steam cleaned or drywall dings repaired?
5. Make a new list of tasks to outsource using sites and apps like Taskrabbit, Thumbtack, Angi—formerly (Angie’s List). Discuss with your Realtor the ROI of the more costly repairs you may be debating. For example I once had a high-end listing with neutral carpet in areas and the sellers thought upgrading the carpet would help their sale. As their Realtor I suggested to them that investing in new carpeting for a home at this price point might be a waste of their money as any potential buyer at the price point would likely want to choose their own flooring and would be able to afford exactly what they wanted. I advised them that if the flooring became an issue (it didn’t) we could offer a modest flooring credit. In the end all it needed was an excellent steam clean, and the issue never arose.
6. Now that you have outsourced the high-impact, but need-help items it’s time to begin your Phase 2 punch list: junk drawers, linen, bedroom and coat closets, kitchen and laundry cabinets— try to just take on one of these Phase 2 items a day, two max—it’s easy to get overwhelmed and super bogged down as these tasks can individually encompass literally hundreds of micro-decisions you need to make about your stuff.
7. Probably the most important result of all of this effort is a visually de-cluttered, de-personalized (if selling), fresh looking space. And the final best secret to accomplishing this quickly in the case of listing your home is to invest in a portable storage “pod” that can sit upon your driveway for however long it takes you to fill it up with the excess stuff you own that creates a cluttered look. These types of units depending on size can cost as little as $80 a month, and can be invaluable as it streamlines your packing, and unpacking process- circumventing the need for transport to and from a brick and mortar storage facility, for not too much higher cost.
Happy Decluttering (& Selling) this Spring!
