The One Time it’s OK to Take it Easy with Your Spring Cleaning

A lot of people love spring but hate spring cleaning, but there’s one situation in particular that can make people dread their spring cleaning even more than usual….If you’re trying to sell your home this year, you’re probably already feeling the stress.

According to Zillow, the best time to start preparing to put your home on the market is right around the same time as spring cleaning. This timing may seem fortuitous. You know that a super-clean home is essential when the time comes to put your house on the market. You’re already cleaning your home, so why not put in that extra effort to prepare your home for the market? The question, really, is about timing as well as your own schedule availability and spring cleaning habits. Just because you know what you’re supposed to do doesn’t mean you have the time to do it. Put another way, life gets in the way.

Allocating Your Personal Resources

If you’re already starting to feel overwhelmed, here’s the good news: As important as your spring cleaning is this year, it probably makes just as much sense to leave it to the pros. Even if you know how to do your own deep clean, there may be subtle differences when you’re trying to prepare a property for an open house or buyer showings. In fact, one of the big differences is that you need to start with an even more ruthless eye toward decluttering your living space. And this isn’t something you can just hand off to the pros. While your realtor or home stager can tell you that your overstuffed wardrobe and extra chair should be removed for showings, it’s on you to determine whether these items will go into storage, trash bin, or donation pile.

Smart, Measured Approaches and Professional Cleaning/Staging Services

There’s no single answer that’s right for every seller, and it’s very much a case of picking your battles. That’s why we call out the competing attitudes—home staging always pays for itself vs. the die-hard DIYers—as itself one of the biggest myths about home staging. At the end of the day, you want an approach that matches your home, your schedule, and your own skills and network of helping hands. With this in mind and as we’ve described, one of the most common and effective strategies is for your to focus on decluttering the home from extraneous personal possessions, while letting the pros do their thing. Do you really want to take on cleaning and painting your own vaulted ceilings?

The Smart Solution for Storage and Staging Storage Spaces

Effectively staging a home takes into account the big-picture and the nitty-gritty details. So, yes, your kitchen(s) and bathrooms need to be douched-out to an unprecedented degree, but don’t ignore your storage spaces, either. There’s no need to take our word for it. In explaining that storage areas should never be more than ¾ of the way full, Jo Potvin (Design to Market in Cincinnati, OH) had this to say about home staging and storage spaces: “You don’t want to have your office suits in the baby room. Don’t fill up the garage, either. You don’t want a buyer to start to worry that they won’t have enough storage space. Unfinished storage areas can’t be ignored. Everything should be up off the floor, boxed, and put on shelves.”

Here’s a no-brainer tip for home staging, spring cleaning, and personal storage: Closetbox offers hassle-free solutions including pickup for about the same cost as traditional self-storage.