Cleaning and Decluttering

Thinking of selling your home? Decluttering and cleaning is the first step to do.  As a stager I have written many blogs about the benefits of staging (here, here, here), and the ASP statistics above shows this as well… but today I want to talk about the part I highlighted.

That’s right, an average of 872% increase in return simply for cleaning and decluttering.

Now I know that decluttering can seem like a daunting task, but you will already have to go through everything to pack, so why not start early? Instead of looking at your home as a whole, break down the process room by room. Organize your things into 4 piles: Keep, Donate, Trash, Maybe (it’s a lot less stressful when you allow yourself the time to decide on items, and the more you sort through the easier it is to let go of things). As items are moved for organizing, it is easy to begin to deep clean hard to get areas.

It is also important to figure out what pace works best for you. Some people prefer to dedicate a few hours a day of work room by room, till they have organized their home. While others prefer to spend a long weekend intensively organizing a cleaning, and get it done as quickly as possible (I’m one of those prefer to power through and get it over with).

It is always surprising to me how many listings one can see posted online, where there hasn’t even been basic tiding done. So, if you are thinking about selling your home, think about the additonal $2,000 you could be making just by decluttering and cleaning : )