If you’re thinking about selling your house, you might want to wait. Taking just a month or two to improve the value of your home could help you tuck away thousands later down the line.
Here are five simple and straightforward things you can do to improve the value of your home before listing.
Repaint
Repainting literally costs as little as a hundred dollars for paint and could make your home look brand new again.
There’s nothing that says age and lack of care quite like peeling paint. If the exterior or interior of your home doesn’t look freshly painted, that first impression alone could kill a potential deal.
So, head over to Home Depot with a few friends or the family and make a couple of weekends out of it. One weekend on the exterior and one on the interior could be all it takes.
Lighting
The amount and type of light that your home gets can have a big impact on its perceived value.
Homes that are brightly lit with soft, diffused light seem the most homely and valuable. If you don’t have good lighting right now, invest a little bit of money on getting better fixtures.
Refinish Your Cabinets
Is the finish on your cabinets peeling or rubbing off? Applying a new layer of varnish or polyurethane can help give your whole kitchen that “new house” look.
Again, this is an extremely inexpensive method of making your home look brand new. It takes less than a day and can be done for under $100.
Curb Appeal
How does your home look from the front of the house?
Fix any visible blemishes at the front of the house. If you have a screen door that has holes in it, have the screen replaced. If the window sills have peeling paint, repaint the sills. If the wood in the staircase is chipping, lay a carpet over it.
Tidy up your garden. Trim the lawn, pull out the weeds and consider adding a few plants to spruce up the look.
Stage and Photograph the House
Finally, have a professional real estate stager work on your home.
Real estate staging is both an art and a science. It first involves deep cleaning your home. All the clutter will be removed and the tiles scrubbed clean. Then the home will be carefully and very subtly decorated.
Finally, a professional photographer is brought in to take photos that bring out the best in the house.
Your real estate agent should provide staging and photography services free of charge.
These five tips will help you give the impression that your home is brand new, even if you’ve lived in it for ten years. Small changes that cost less than $1,000 in total can easily help you increase the value of your home by $10,000, $20,000 or even more.
