Preparing your home to sell can be a challenging job that will make you crazy if you let it. There are so many little tasks and an unbelievable array of differing specialists that might have to be called in that simply scheduling the tradesmen to get your place all spruced up is tough. Fortunately, there’s help. Your home staging expert, who does this sort of thing all the time, can help you simplify the process. Staging your home to sell doesn’t have to be a nightmare.
Thinking like a business manager will help.
We often forget that the process of selling a house is big business. For reasons we cannot explain, we tend to forget that a home is often our biggest investment. We think strategically when we buy or sell stocks, shares or bonds, why would we neglect that strategy when we’re about to liquidate our biggest asset? Going into the sale process with a plan is no different to undertaking a new business start-up. Doing it right is the result of right-thinking and carefully examining even the little options before making decisions.
Think about the tools you will need to get your house ready to sell.
Specialised tools such as carpet cleaning machines, scaffolding, extension ladders and power washers are often necessary to accomplish the tasks that make up the big job of preparing your house for listing. You are going to become a familiar face in the local equipment hire centre. The trick to using these tools is to discover what tools can be used for more than one task and using them to their fullest capacity.
If you’re going to paint the exterior of your house you’ll want to clean the cladding material before you start. Do you want to rent a power washer or will your garden hose do the trick?
A pressure washer can be used to clean your deck, including the railings and stairs, to remove stubborn stains from the driveway, to clean cladding and brick walls, to clean and flush out gutters and spruce up the outdoor furniture you’ll be using to stage your backyard. It sounds like the answer to many of your problems.
On the other hand, if your home’s exterior is brick, stucco, or wood shingles, the pressure-washing process is likely to damage the surfaces it’s used on. Damage to these surfaces could set your sale process back by weeks and the dollars involved in making the repairs are many. Perhaps the best bet for you is to just buy one of the several kits available at your home improvement store that can be used to scrub the exterior of your house and whisk away oil stains on the driveway.
The time spent in planning before you start is the first important step. When you think things through beforehand, lots of money can be saved. More importantly, you can save your sanity if you think strategically. Running in circles is rarely productive.
Will you need an extension ladder or will scaffolding be a better solution? How many people will be working on the paint job at one time? One person can burn the majority of a day in the upping and downing involved in using a ladder. Check the price for renting scaffolding. You might be surprised at the savings you could enjoy – not to mention the fact that the scaffold could accommodate multiple painters at any given time.
Don’t be like the old general who leaped on his horse and rode off rapidly in all directions. The process of staging your home to sell can be accomplished better if you get all the help and direction you need in that initial planning phase. Your home stylist is very familiar with handling all the details involved in each step of staging. From tools to tradesmen and handy-people that can assist you along the way, your stylist is a wealth of information. Having and leveraging the right info at hand is the best way we know to approach the sale of your house like a pro.
