Getting your home ready to sell is never easy. There’s always much to be done in terms of cleaning, decluttering, decorating, and ensuring everything looks pristine before you have potential buyers touring the place.
But certain factors can compound these difficulties and make the home staging process exponentially more grueling. One of those factors is having young kids on the premises.
Make no mistake: Kids are wonderful. But they also tend to be pretty messy, and they don’t always give you the time, space, or accommodation you need to clean, stage, and organize.
So in this post, we’ll offer just a few house selling tips, specifically aimed at parents of little ones.
But before we get into that, remember that you can always find out the best way to sell a house simply by signing up for a SOLD.com report. It’s free, it just takes a moment, and it will furnish you with some individualized advice on how to get the place listed.
And with that, here are our tips for selling your house…parents edition!
House Selling Tips: Cleaning and Staging When There Are Kids in the House
Start a New Normal
First things first: as a parent, you’re probably used to telling your kids to pick up their LEGOs or their PAW Patrol toys, oh, about once every hour or so.
It’s only natural that you get a little sick of it and may let your kids keep some of their toys out for a few hours, maybe even a few days.
No shame in that! However, when you are trying to get your house sold, you simply don’t have the luxury of leaving the toys out. It’s vital to have your home picked up pretty regularly, and that may require you to initiate a new normal with your kids. Get them in the habit of cleaning up before they leave the room, or before lunch and dinner, or at the very least before bed each evening!
Pare Down the Toy Collection
Something else you can do is minimize the number of toys that are available to your kid at any given time. Fewer toys means smaller messes and less to pick up. It makes sense, right?
You probably have a pretty good sense of what your kids play with often and what they play with infrequently. Maybe while your little ones are asleep, you can take some of those less-called-upon toys and quietly shuffle them into storage until Moving Day rolls around.
We’re not saying get rid of all your children’s toys! Just make things a little easier to manage—for you and for them.
Neutralize!
One of the top tips for selling your house is to keep things as neutral as possible. That means toning down any garish or polarizing colors in your home decor.
Ah, but what about your son’s Cars 3 poster or your daughter’s bright-pink Frozen blanket?
Covering or removing these items just until the move can really go a long way toward making your house more buyer friendly. You probably won’t get away with stripping away all your kids’ favorite decor, and you don’t have to. But if you can store some of the most attention-grabbing items, that can really be helpful to you.
Reduce Bulky Furniture
One of the most common home staging problems that parents face? A lot of big, bulky furniture, which makes the rooms look less spacious.
Ideally, you can move the huge kids’ bed into storage and let them sleep on a smaller day bed until the house closes. But that may be a tall order. At the very least, you can cut down on some of the big, oversized pillows and clear off surface areas on dressers or desks—anything within your power to make the space look bigger and less crowded.
Find Out the Best Way to Sell a House via SOLD.com
These are just a few ways in which parents can make the staging process run a little bit more smoothly.
As you consider your options for listing and for selling, don’t forget to sign up for your FREE SOLD.com report, which will provide you with an unbiased recommendation for how to proceed. Request yours today!
