Table of Contents
- Why Should You Declutter Your Home Before Selling It?
- 5 Actionable Tips on How to Declutter Your Home
- The Quickest and Easiest Way to Declutter Your Home
Are you wondering how to quickly and easily declutter your home before selling it?
Decluttering is a crucial step in staging a home for sale. Not only will it make your home seem spacious, but it’ll also look more appealing to home buyers.
In this post, we’ll show you how to declutter your home before selling it. We’ll also provide you with 5 actionable decluttering tips, plus the absolute quickest and easiest solution to make your real estate images look clutter-free and amazing.
Let’s start by taking a look at why you should declutter a home before listing it for sale.
Why Should You Declutter Your Home Before Selling It?
Research shows that people only use 20% of what they own 80% of the time. The rest takes up unnecessary space, and are mostly untouched.
Decluttering a home before a sale is one of the most important steps in the staging process. It will help you showcase the home in its best possible light.
Potential buyers can visualize themselves living in the space without a bunch of personal items interfering.
A messy home, full of personal photos, artwork, clothes, and other belongings can even be off-putting to the buyer who doesn’t share your personal taste and will also make the home look small and cramped up.
When you put your home up for sale, you want to showcase the house and not its contents.
On the other hand, making it look clean and spacious and leaving room for the buyer to visualize themselves enjoying a relaxing evening on the sofa or cooking a tasty meal in the kitchen can help you sell your home for top dollar.
5 Actionable Tips on How to Declutter Your Home
Here are 5 actionable tips on how to declutter your home before selling it and what rooms to pay extra attention to.
1. Tidy Up the Hallway
Since hallways are often small, it is easy for them to become cluttered. They are one of the first places people see when they enter your house.
By clearing the clutter from your hallway, you can make sure you give potential homebuyers a good first impression when they enter your home.
Consider the following:
- Sort through coats, shoes, and accessories and remove seasonal clothes and shoes
- Clear away pet leashes, toys, and beds
- Remove possible news magazines and other mail and tidy up the space
A tip is to invest in some good shoe storage to help you keep the hallway tidy and decluttered.
2. Clean the Kitchen
The kitchen is the biggest influencer on prospective buyers, so making an extra effort to declutter the kitchen will go a long way to boost a sale.
Buyers want to imagine themselves cooking a nice meal in a clean and spacious kitchen.
Here’s what you can do:
- Remove all unnecessary items like kitchen appliances and gadgets from the kitchen work surfaces
- Clean and tidy up cupboards and drawers from too many pans and cutlery that makes the drawers seem small and overcrowded
- Remove personal photos, other artwork, and magnets from the fridge
- Declutter windowsills from excess plants and ornaments to make your windows look more spacious, letting lots of daylight in
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3. Declutter the Living Room
Just like the kitchen, the living room is one of the most important rooms that prospective buyers generally pay extra attention to.
It needs to look warm and welcoming so that buyers can imagine themselves unwinding on the sofa in front of their favorite TV show.
It also needs to feel spacious, so here’s what to pare back:
- Get rid of worn-out and excess furniture. This will instantly make the room look more spacious and clean
- Depersonalize the space. No matter how much you love your family and wedding photos, they may interfere with potential buyers’ ideas and their vision of the space
- Remove over-sized pieces like large coffee tables or gym equipment that make the living room look small and cramped up
4. Don’t Forget the Master Bedroom
Don’t think for a second that buyers visiting your home won’t open fitted cabinets to check out the interior space.
So in order to provide a positive first impression, bedrooms and any other rooms with fitted furniture should be decluttered and cleaned.
Do the following:
- Remove clothes, blankets, and teddy bears thrown on the bed to make the bed look tidy and clean
- Declutter and clean all wardrobes. A too full and messy wardrobe creates the impression that it really has no space
- Clear out the drawers and put excess underwear, tops, and trousers in storage boxes
- If you keep storage under the bed, make sure to hide it properly
Making these simple yet effective adjustments will make a compact bedroom feel larger and more spacious, which can have a huge impact on the buyer’s decision.
5. Other Areas to Declutter
Even though the hallway, kitchen, living room, and master bedroom are important rooms that potential buyers pay extra attention to on a real estate listing, there are other rooms that need tidying up as well to impress buyers.
Remember to also declutter the:
- Bathroom
- Kids’ room
- Home office
- Garage
- Loft or basement
- And garden
Investing time and effort into decluttering and depersonalizing these rooms will have a huge impact on how fast your home will sell and can even lead to higher offers.
With that said, let’s now take a look at the quickest and easiest way to declutter your home before selling it.
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The Quickest and Easiest Way to Declutter Your Home
Recent studies have shown that household decluttering takes an average of 208 hours a year. This translates to 1 year and 3 months in a lifetime.
Luckily, there’s a quick and easy way to declutter your real estate images that will save you a lot of time and frustration, as well as money!
This solution is called virtual decluttering or virtual staging. Virtual staging is a special computer-assisted design (CAD) process wherein images of messy and cluttered rooms can be virtually decluttered and depersonalized.
Virtual staging can also be used to:
- Stage vacant or outdated rooms with photo-realistic digital furniture
- Make digital repairs and redecoration
- Change colors on walls, furnishings, ceiling, and flooring
- Improve the landscaping in form of sky replacements and green grass enhancements, staging of patio and pool areas, balconies, and more.
For example, in these before and after images virtual staging is used to stage a vacant bedroom:
Best yet, virtual staging can reduce the cost of regular decluttering and staging by up to 97%.
For the low cost of $20 to $30 per image, you can get your home ready to list on the MLS and other listing sites in less than 48 hours!
All you need to do is sign up for a free PhotoUp account and upload your images to our easy-to-use software, add instructions, and wait for your decluttered images to be delivered back to you in just a day or two.
PhotoUp Virtual Staging Demo
To see how easy it is to get started, check out our short virtual staging demo:
It’s as easy as 1-2-3!
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today, and let our professional photo editors declutter your images in a heartbeat!
PhotoUp’s expert designers will make sure your images look clean and captivating, likely leading to more buyer interest and a faster sale!
We hope this blog post helped you learn how to declutter your home before selling it, as well as introduced an even quicker and easier solution to make your real estate listing images look amazing.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure to check out the following resources as well:
- Renovating vs Virtual Staging: Redesigning Homes for Faster Sales
- Best Virtual Staging Companies of 2024 (Rated & Compared)
- How to Virtually Stage a Room in Less Than 5 Minutes
- What Is Virtual Staging in Real Estate? (Examples Included)
- Virtual Staging for Real Estate Listings (Fast & Affordable Service)
