Selling Your Desert Home continued...

Laundry Rooms are usually small, and easily prepared. Check the basics, and then make sure the room does not have any unpleasant odors. Lights should work, and the evacuation duct for the dryer should be clean. The water service area for the washer can be cleaned a bit – most have rust, calcium or other unsightly attachments. You don't have to overdo this, just make it look attended to. Taking a shop vacuum to the dryer, and the walls and edges of the laundry room, especially smaller rooms, is a great idea. You might also open the dryer and vacuum out the inside. A dust rag on a broom that has been sprayed with Endust will make quick work of getting all the lint off the walls. (You most likely will not be able to see the lint on the walls, but if you wipe them with a treated rag, you'll be amazed at what you see on the rag.) There's most likely a set of instructions for completely cleaning the dryer's insides in your instruction manual. Cleaning the dryer insides will help keep the room (and house) cleaner while the house is being shown and sold.

Basements are so varied that it is hard to deal with them herein. Everything before this should pretty much prepare you for the task. Basements frequently have sumps, special drains, special electrical items, special rooms. Use the tips above to help you make sure that your basement is in top condition for showing.

Now that you have completed your room-by-room list of things to do, decide at what level you should do each – always bearing in mind the balance mentioned earlier. Make a list of things you need from the hardware store, and then get busy. You'll likely find it easier to perform your tasks by category, rather than by room. For example, go around and service all the door hinges, knobs, locksets, and handles in the house at one time. Then do all the windows in the house, and so forth. A decent rule of thumb for your planning purposes is this: it will take one hour to one and a half hours per room to prepare a house for sale, plus two to three hours in the garage, and three to five hours in the yard.

You can also look into making actual improvements for the sale of your house, such as upgrading to new kitchen cabinets instead of cleaning and servicing the existing ones, or installing some new ceiling fans or light fixtures. Volumes have been written telling about such things, and the probability of profiting by doing them to your home. Some people make a business of it – buying a home, making some improvements and then selling the home for a profit. Making improvements for selling is surely an option, but it is one that should be approached slowly, cautiously, and with great care. It's easy to let a contractor project get away from you, and costs to run well over expectations, or timelines to run quite long. These things can be devastating, especially if you are relocating for a new job and must move by a specified date.

Lastly, after you select the realtor you wish to represent you in the sale of your house, you should by all means ask them for their suggestions about preparing your house for the pending sale. An experienced agent will take the time necessary to show you everything you should do to make your home its most salable. They fully know the area where your house is located, and are familiar with things that other sellers might not have attended to – costing them money at the closing table. Each area has little things about the houses and/or yards that people need to fix up or repair – maybe because of the water in the area, or the sun, or industry – but the realty agent will know these things. They sell houses for a living, and they deal with hundreds of people who look at homes to buy – so they hear every single possible complaint, and compliment.

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