Preparing Your House to Sell: Essential Checklist for Sellers

Oh, boy. It’s a busy week preparing your house to sell, but our house is under contract! Our cute little yellow house was on the market nine days before we got an offer, so now we’re in that awkward waiting-to-pass-inspection-and-hoping-not-to-lose-our-jobs phase which is really fun when you’re selling a house during coronavirus.

It’s been about a month since we decided we were going to move back to Florida to be basic bitches on those beautiful Gulf Coast beaches and be closer to friends who also have kids our daughter’s age, so it’s been busy for us since then.

Looking back, we calculated it was two-and-a-half weeks between when we reached out to our realtor to ask about selling and when we actually put it on the market, so we had a crash course in prepping a house for listing and learned many, many lessons in that time.

Being DIYers, we’ve made a lot of improvements on the house over the last year-ish of living here, but we’re also part of that 95% club where the last 5% of your projects never get finished because you’re too busy moving onto the next one. That meant we had a long list of things to finish up and get in order before listing, and had to do it with two dogs shedding hair on the clean floors every five seconds, a baby spitting up on the rug and two full-time jobs.

We’ve put together a few tips on preparing your house to sell in a quick turnaround timeframe, and a handy bonus cheatsheet for how to get your ass in gear when you get a last-minute showing request.

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Lists on lists on lists

I’m a list maker at the best of times, but man, does preparing your house to sell bring out the list-making demon in me or what. We had a shared note on our phones where we brainstormed all of the things we would ideally get done, then we parsed them out into categories: before photos were taken, before the listing went live, and before showings started.

Luckily, we had listing photos taken on a Friday and the house was going live on Monday, so we got everything looking nice and staged for photos by shoving shit into closets that weren’t going to be shown in photos, then used the weekend to actually pack and move that stuff into the attic before people would be coming in person.

We then split the tasks up and made a secondary list for which one of us was responsible for each, which really helped keep us on track (and it just feels like you’re accomplishing more when you can physically check something off a list).

De-clutter

If you’re like us and you’ll be living in the house while selling it, you’re going to want to declutter. Our realtor told us while preparing your house to sell to take down any personal decor and to make sure surfaces like bathrooms and the kitchen countertops are completely clear. You want to make it look homely and staged, but not over-decorated or people won’t be able to imagine all their stuff in the house.

We took down a lot of the photos on our DIY photo ledge in the hallway but kept up a few so people knew what it was used for. We took down our engagement photos from the bedroom, took down Eleanor’s name sign above her crib, and put the dog bowls out of sight, for example.

Fill in any holes and touch up paint

This one’s kind of obvious, but spackle over any holes in the wall and touch up the paint as needed. We use this spackle that starts out pink and dries white, then you just sand it down and paint over the top.

We also have kept all of our touchup paint since moving in since we’ve repainted almost every room, so that was handy.

Side note: We wrote this blog post a while back about how we store our touch-up paint in quick-access mason jars with labels.

Fix any cheap, quick problems

For us, this was changing out a couple of light fixtures (like this boob light in our hallway), re-caulking some of the door trim, painting our bathtub, and touching up the gross, stained grout in our guest bathroom.

Oh, and Alex spent an afternoon rebuilding the back steps by our kitchen that were rotten and falling apart.

The way we saw it, our total budget to get the house prepped was about $300 and anything more than that probably wasn’t worth the time and money for its return. If you can DIY or hire a handyman to fix that leaky sink, replace a couple of broken outlet covers or replace a torn window screen, it’ll definitely help the overall appeal when someone is walking through.

Paint trim and doors

This one is dependent on time, but for the couple of nights worth of painting it worked out to be, it was totally worth it. I painted all of the baseboards, cased openings, doors and door frames in The. Whole. House.

Thankfully, we’d already done our bedroom, the guest bedroom, guest bathroom and mudroom recently when we did projects in there so that helped cut down the time.

Honestly, the difference was incredible. Like, the baseboards looked white to me, but when I went over it with actual white paint the original color looked like old skank cheese so it helped make everything just look crisp and fresh.

Curb appeal

Our realtor told us this one is probably the most important element to get right while preparing your house to sell. There’s the old don’t judge a book by its cover saying but let’s be honest, we obviously all do. I’m not about to read some boring-looking book with an ancient scroll on the front or one with Comic Sans in the title, I’m just not.

We had already done a lot to our front porch area in the last few months, including taking down the old iron railings, wrapping our porch beams (DIY post coming soon on that one), painting the porch and walkway and clearing out the garden beds.

If you’re short on time, at least clear out any garden beds and put down some topsoil over the whole area. As a bonus, add in a few small shrubs or flowers to make it look nice, and giving your front door a fresh coat of paint is a nice touch.

Make sure your garden hose is away or nicely coiled up, and get rid of any wasp nests, spider webs, dirt and grime or whatever is around the front of your house.

Cleanin’ out your closets

Now that Eminem is fiercely stuck in your head, this is kind of part of decluttering but a step further. We kept a few things in closets (like a couple of folded-up towels in the bathroom linen closet, a few of Alex’s work shirts in our closet, the broom and mop in the utility closet) but packed everything else up in boxes in the attic. It made the closets all look bigger and gave a good idea of how much storage there is without it being overflowing and full.

This might not be the most memorable tip on how to get your house ready to sell, but it’s one that could definitely stop a buyer from moving on from your home.

Make a quick-grab box for each room

This one was honestly one of my best ideas. For the main everyday use rooms (kitchen, bathrooms) we had a cute storage box assigned to each that we would pack up and put away in a closet each day during the showing period.

We kept all our toiletries in a travel bag as if we were on vacation and put them away each day, including shower products and razors etc.

Being that we have a baby, the kitchen box was mostly full of things like bottles and formula, but also spray oil that’s usually on the counter by the stove top, the oven mitt that usually hangs by the oven, things like that. We put that box under the kitchen sink each morning and we also used paper plates for basically every meal in that nine days so we didn’t have any dirty dishes in the sink to worry about last-minute! To that effect – run the dishwasher each night and put it away in the morning.

Make a house showing checklist

Hopefully once your house is listed you’ll be getting showing requests right away! Our first one came in two hours after we listed and we only had about 30 minutes notice. We’d come to find out that’s pretty common around here – 30 minutes notice, but realtors showing up 20 minutes early, which really means 10 minutes notice, so we had to be fast.

Being that we’ve both been working from home this whole time, that meant gathering up our laptops and chargers, leashing up the dogs and grabbing baby supplies to load up in the car and lurk around the neighborhood for a while.

That first time was a hectic mess – I left one lone shoe in the middle of our mudroom floor and the realtor and potential buyer came up to the door 20 minutes early as I was literally walking out with both arms full of random last-minute crap I’d cleaned. Unsurprisingly, those are not our buyers.

After that time, we drafted up a checklist for leaving the house before a showing to make sure we’d done everything before heading out the door. Here’s an image to save, or you can download a PDF here.

Resign yourself to the fact you won’t do it all

There are a few things on our original how to get your house ready to sell list we didn’t get to, like touching up ceiling paint around the attic entrance and around the mudroom light fixture, but we got most of the way there. In the end, we kind of triaged everything we had left and abandoned most of the little tasks.

I think a lot of it was just minor things most people probably wouldn’t even notice, or at least that’s what we told ourselves.

We hustled hard and it was a rough couple of weeks but we really had a quick lesson in preparing your house to sell! We had about nine showings in the nine days it was on the market (with three of them being the lady who ultimately put in the offer), and there’s no real way of knowing whether all these things tangibly helped set our home aside from the others on the market, but we’re so excited to get under contract and start making plans for our move.