If you are planning on selling your home this spring, there are many things that need to be tackled first before opening your doors to potential buyers.

Natural Light. One of the first and easiest things you can do is use natural light to flood your rooms. Showing a room with a lot of natural, warm light gives the feeling of a welcoming house with a lot of open space. Opening curtains and raising blinds will allow the natural light to flood your house. Once this is completed you can do a visual inventory of rooms and start removing things that have seen better days.

Disassociate yourself from your house. The object here is to declutter. You want a potential buyer to see a canvas of a room where they can envision how they would want it to look. This is why clutter can be incredibly distracting to potential buyers. Sever your emotions and realize that a home is about the occupants who live there.

Depersonalizing your house. Next on the list and dovetails in disassociating yourself is depersonalizing your home. This means starting to pack up family pictures, heirlooms, and knick-knacks. Remember you are trying to give a potential buyer a blank canvas in which they can visualize how the home might look filled with their own items.

Paint with whites and neutrals. Everyone loves color. When we personalize our new houses, we typically add colors that trigger emotional responses in us. The same goes for carpeting. This also helps with odors, you know the stuff you’ve become ‘nose blind’ to. I remember years ago, I was looking to purchase a house with my wife. We walked into a house that I loved. When we left I asked my wife’s opinion of the house. She said she didn’t like it. Why you might ask? She didn’t like the color of the carpet. Think about it. It’s just carpet. Carpet can be replaced, but walking into a house full of colors can also trigger negative emotional responses and some people may not be able to see beyond this. Remember the blank canvas.

Lastly,  fix anything broken.   Typically a buyer who makes an offer will have a home inspector scrutinize about 1,600 items! These items will have to be fixed eventually. So when the time comes that you are ready to open your house to potential buyers, you can just concentrate on the curbside appeal of your house.