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How to Prepare Your Home for an Open House

While no one likes moving, it’s a necessary transition that practically everyone will have to perform at some point in their life. Before you can even make the move, however, you need to sell your home first. In the game of selling, appearance is everything. That’s why preparing for the open house is so vital when it comes to selling your home. It can be easy to miss certain details, however, that could be the deciding factor that makes or breaks a sale. To ensure that you exceed your expectations at the open house and make the best sale possible on your home, you should consider these tips and ideas.

Preparing for an open house – Lighting

Perhaps you noticed that when you enter a home that is bright and lit up, the entire place just feels a lot bigger and cleaner. For whatever reason, humans tend to react positively to bright homes. Darker homes can often make you feel enclosed and not necessarily in a good way. That’s why lighting is so important to consider for your open house.

You don’t want people to come in and think that your home feels cramped or oppressive. Everyone wants to think that their home is spacious and offers a lot of space to grow in. Even those who prefer tinier homes still want to feel as though each room has a lot of space. You can offer that illusion by playing with the lighting.

For example, the best way to increase the lighting in your home is to let in natural light. If your house has a lot of windows, then this is going to be easy for you. Simply pull back the blinds or curtains and let that light shine into your home. It’s not a bad way to check on the views from those windows either. If there’s a giant bush that has overgrown and blocks most of your window, then it’d be a good idea to chop it down so more light can enter into the room.

If you have lots of windows

For those who aren’t fortunate enough to have a lot of windows to let in natural light, then you’re going to need to do what you can with artificial lights. Sometimes all you need to do is replace light bulbs with ones that offer a brighter illumination. However, it is important that the light doesn’t offer a blinding contrast that can make the rest of your home bleed out in terms of color. You’re not looking to bleach out everything.

That’s why it’s typically a good idea to have a few lights in key parts of the home that you, especially, wish to highlight and that make a space appear bigger. It’s best to play around with the lighting in your home for a while. See what works best and stick with it. You may want to consider some home staging advice from your realtor at your open house or an interior designer. They typically know a few lighting secrets that can really illuminate your home.

Besides adding in more light to your home, you should also have all of the lights on. Again, this is to make your home appear bright, but it also makes the home cozy and welcoming. It’s easier for potential buyers to imagine themselves living the home if they’re able to walk right in and feel welcomed by warm and bright lights. Any open house needs lots of light to show the property well.

Preparing for an open house – Landscaping

Home staging goes far beyond just how your house looks on the inside. The outside and surrounding area are just as important. Most judgments that potential buyers are going to make at an open house begins right from the front yard as they pull into the driveway. Would you be excited to see the inside of a home when you pull in on a cracked driveway and notice that there are weeds growing in the grass? It doesn’t exactly make for the best welcoming message.

When it comes to selling your home, the exterior matters considerably. As such, you should attempt to mow the lawn regularly and keep the grass freshly cut. To ensure that it is green and healthy looking, you should water the grass about a half hour before the opening of the open house. With a bright green lawn, your buyers are going to easily imagine themselves sprawling out on it during the summer and cooking some barbecue.

Its not just a lawn

Besides just the lawn, you should make sure that the garden–and lawn itself–is free of weeds. Trim the garden, too, to make sure that it looks well-cared for. Even if you have long since given up on your garden, you should at least make it look like there was an attempt to love plants. The easiest way to do that would be to just tear the remaining plants out of it and re-plant only a few fully-grown plants. Since it’s likely that the new owners will want to plant their own garden and will rip out the plants you have there anyway, at most, you just want to make sure that your current garden is limited in scale and trimmed.

In regards to the actual exterior of your home, a good power wash certainly won’t hurt. It can actually make your home look a lot newer and fresh. If your front door is old and battered, then you might want to consider replacing it. The same goes for old doormats that have clearly been used and abused. This is the welcome center of your home. If it doesn’t look great, then you’re not going to make those buyers feel excited and welcomed as they enter your home.

Final touches on the exterior of your home should be focused on appearance. Any trash cans or bins should be placed somewhere that they cannot see them. They don’t want to see your trash. You should also make sure that your mail or newspaper is picked up either by yourself or the realtor during the open house as quickly as possible. Piles of mail and newspapers can look unprofessional.

Kitchen

Home staging in the kitchen is vital. For many buyers, the kitchen is going to be their primary room of interest. If this area doesn’t meet their standards, then you can be sure they’ll be leaving to visit the next house. The most obvious rule of thumb here is to ensure that everything is clean. Wipe down those counters, make sure the oven is clean, and take great care to ensure there aren’t any crumbs anywhere. Your pantry door and cupboards should all be closed. While it doesn’t hurt to have a bowl of fruit or flowers on the counters, you should try to limit the amount of clutter.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a bowl of cookies for buyers to have. Nothing quite feels like a welcome feeling like a warm tray of cookies. To take that up a notch, you may want to be overly ambitious and cook a few different kinds of cookies in order to pertain to guests of varying tastes and dietary restrictions.

Again, you want to make sure that the trash can in the kitchen is placed out of view. You don’t want people looking through your trash. You also want to limit the chance of a bad odor from stemming from the trash can due to a meal your family had the night before.

Fact sheets should be be ready for visitors in the kitchen. This is usually one of the first rooms that people investigate, and so they can take a cookie and read over the fact sheet at their leisure in the welcoming space that you’ve created for them. remember kitchen is one of the most crucial areas when preparing for open house.

Open house – Bathrooms

Perhaps the heaviest cleaning that you’re going to need to perform is in the bathroom. No one wants to go into a bathroom and feel as though it’s actually ever been used in the past. Instead, they prefer to think that the bathroom is new and untouched. You can offer them this illusion by cleaning the bathroom until it shines. There’s also a few little details that can make it look professional and clean.

For example, the toilet lid should always be closed. Not only does this ensure that the inside bowl isn’t visible, but it can also help cut down on potential odors. Again, it also makes it appear as though the bathroom is brand new. This is an excellent detail of home staging that not every homeowner considers.

Another aspect is to remove all of your showering and personal items during an open house. Your razor, soap, deodorant, everything you use to prepare yourself for the day should be away and off of the counter or out of your shower. You want to make your buyers see the bathroom as their own. They can’t do that if they have a physical reminder of you within that space. This is a critical element when preparing for an open house.

Last Details

When your home is clean, push back the curtains. Place the cookies are on the counter. You still have a few last few details that you might want to consider. The first is temperature. While the temperature of the home may vary depending on the weather outside, you should typically try to keep your home within the 68-72 degree range. This creates a comfortable space rather than being too chilly or too warm.

You may also feel like it’s a good idea to add in scents or candles. This isn’t always the case. Sometimes these scents can become overpowering and can give people headaches. You don’t want to drive them away because of a strong scent. Others may believe that the scents are an attempt to cover up an odor in the home. It’s best to just leave them out and keep your home clean to prevent odors from occurring.

Finally, if the weather is pleasant, open all of your windows for fresh air.

Using a mobile storage solution from Box-n-Go is an ideal route to de-cluttering your home and preparing for open house. Southern California residents can have a storage container delivered to their home. This will allow them to de-clutter and have a quick sale. One of the major points made repeatedly by home experts who try and get the best price for a home is that good presentation is vital.  When any general makeover is carried out they always insist on a lack of ‘clutter’. Especially when the finished homes are presented for sale. This “home staging” as it is called is beneficial as real estate agents claim that that a well presented and clutter free home will sell quickly.

Contact Box-n-Go at https://www.boxngo.com or by calling 1-877-269-6461.