Tip 4: Furniture & Decluttering
When you are trying to sell your property, you want the home
to look as spacious as possible. This means assessing how your furniture,
collections and décor fit in to the space that you have.
Important things to take in to consideration when looking at
each room:
- is my furniture too
big for this space?
- do I have too many
personal items on display?
- should I just move
everything out?
People often make the mistake of falling in love with a
lounge or bed because of comfort or the way it looks, and when it’s actually in
the property, we realise that it’s actually just a little too big for the
space. Some of our tips:
Bedrooms - Things like large beds and bedside tables in
small bedrooms makes the room look even smaller. Our suggestion is, get some
small bedside tables (often this will be without drawers which is completely
impractical for living, but necessary for sizing). If you can, in your master
bedroom, we recommend putting your normal King or Queen bed into storage and
hire or borrow a double bed which will create the impression of space. You can
apply the same tips for the kids rooms if they have double beds, go back to
single beds temporarily.
Lounge rooms – Oversized comfy sofa’s are great for the
family lounging together, but when you’re looking to sell, if you have two
lounge suites consider moving one of them into storage or if you have a couple
of chairs in your set, put one or both of them in storage. Also, consider your
coffee and/or side tables. Again, although it’s not practical for living, just
for sale, either swap them for smaller one’s or remove altogether and place in
storage.
Collections and personal items – You want your house to look
like a home, so don’t remove all your personal items and collectibles, but
perhaps halve them. It will make dusting before open inspections easier and the
space will feel more open and cleaner with less items on each surface. We
recommend that personal photos and valuables should be put away for open
inspections.
Even if you have another house to move to, we don’t
recommend just moving all your items out. Selling an empty house is not an easy
task due to the following:
• The marketing
photography of a house full of empty rooms does not create any excitement in
buyers looking for a new home. Think of the last time you looked at an empty
property online. How quickly did you flick through the photos and how often did
you ask, “what’s that room?”
• When the buyers
come to the open, they have a hard time determining how their furniture will
fit in the space. The need to have some furniture there already as a point of
reference and will often assume the worst eg. “this room’s definitely too small
for our lounge suite”.
• As with not
removing too many of your personal/decorator items, you still want the house to
feel like a home. An empty property feels abandoned and unloved, like the
previous owner couldn’t wait to get out of there!
“Clearing clutter directs you towards paced progress…”
~Chayan Jain~
If you would like to see all our tips, please email info@spartners.com.au to request a copy of our Preparing Your Home For Sale booklet.
