Selling a home is always stressful, but when you have young kids, keeping everything spotless and show ready can be a major challenge. Battling grimy fingerprints, carpet stains, laundry piles, and toys strewn about the house is a full-time job! While it may seem like an uphill battle, it really is possible to prepare your home for sale and wow potential buyers as a busy parent. All it takes is good planning and a few effective cleaning strategies! As you get your home ready for the market, keep the following tips in mind.
Hire Professional Help
Starting with a spotless home will make it much easier to stay on top of mess while your property sits on the market. If you don’t have the time to deep clean your home from top to bottom, a professional cleaning can be a lifesaver! You might even want to have your home professionally cleaned on a regular basis until you find a potential buyer.
For a broader range of assistance, consider hiring a housekeeper to stay on top of your cleaning and maintenance tasks. This way, you can focus on decluttering, staging, and keeping your kids occupied during showings. Unlike one-time house cleaning services, housekeepers take on all kinds of duties around the house, including laundry, garbage disposal, general upkeep, and even meal prep.
Get Rid of Clutter
Clutter will make your home feel messy to potential buyers, even if you spent all day cleaning. Not only that but Let’s Make Room argues that clutter will distract your buyers from seeing the best features of your home and can make your rooms feel smaller! House hunters may even interpret clutter as a sign of poor maintenance.
Get your whole family involved in a mass decluttering effort to pare down your belongings and free up space in your home. As you go, sort everything into four piles—trash, give away, storage, and keep. When it comes to your kids’ rooms, encourage your children to donate their unwanted toys or sell them at a yard sale and let them keep the pocket change.
Invest in a Few Staging Accents
For a quick and easy home sale, make it as easy as possible for your buyers to picture themselves living in your home. Unfortunately, this means depersonalizing your space to remove family photos and anything else that might distract your buyers. You might also want to repaint any bold-colored walls in your children’s rooms to make everything neutral.
Once your home is a blank slate that will appeal to almost anyone, add a couple of homey touches to make the place feel lived-in again. For example, Real Simple recommends staging tricks like adding mirrors to brighten up your rooms, hanging breezy window treatments, and placing some fluffy, white towels in the bathroom.
Clean as You Go
You never know when you’re going to get the call that potential buyers are on the way to look at your home. Avoid the stressful last-minute cleaning dash by tidying up as you go about your day. Load the dishwasher right after eating, wipe down counters after cooking, and keep a basket close at hand for any misplaced children’s toys. Get in the habit of putting things back where they go as soon as you’re done with them. All of this might sound like a lot of effort, but you’ll quickly discover that cleaning as you go will save you time and stress in the long run.
Selling a home as a busy parent may sound hard, but it’s far from impossible! Declutter, depersonalize, clean regularly, hire housekeeping help, and you should have no problem keeping up with the mess and maintaining a spotless home. A little effort upfront will help you sell your home quickly and for the price you want, so you can move to your dream property as soon as possible!