buying your first home - what you should know

Cleaning Checklist Before Listing Your Home For Sale

The cleanliness of your home tells a potential buyer that your home has been well cared for, which can make your home look more desirable. Everyday cleaning before listing your home just isn't going to cut it though. You need to do a deep cleaning throughout your entire home. This means cleaning things you probably haven't thought about cleaning before, such as your window sills. See below for a cleaning checklist to complete before listing your home for sale.

Vents And Ceiling Fans

Those wall vents can attract quite a bit of dust, as can your ceiling fan blades. Use the bristle attachment on your vacuum to get into your vents, or take them off and clean them in warm, soapy water. For ceiling fans, use a rag with warm soapy water. Clean the top and bottoms of each fan blade, as well as the light bulb and glass covers. 

Walls, Baseboards And Ceilings

Basically, you need to clean all of your walls from top to bottom. A potential buyer isn't just looking down at your floors, they are going to look at everything in your home. The last thing anyone wants to see are cobwebs in the corners of your rooms or hanging from the ceiling. Clean your rooms one at a time working from the top down to the floor. It's a lot of work, so if you only do one room per day, that's OK.

Light Fixtures And Lampshades

You want to have a lot of light when a buyer comes to look at your house. But all that light will only highlight the dust on bulbs and fixtures, so be sure to remember to clean these areas. This is a good time to make sure every light fixture has a working bulb as well.

Kitchen Sink

Scour the kitchen sink, scrubbing it clean so it shines like new. Clean the area around the sink as well to get rid of unsightly hard water stains. You can easily remove hard water with white vinegar. Allow the vinegar to sit on the hard water stain for ten minutes for harder to remove stains.

Throughout The Home

While going room to room cleaning, get rid of excess clutter. Pack away all of those family photos sitting on your entryway table. Put those trophies and awards sitting in your office into storage until you sell your home. You want your home to look less lived in and more like a staged house, so this means getting rid of most of your personal belongings. Put away toiletries so they aren't sitting on the bathroom sink. Clean everything off of your countertops so you see more counter space and less clutter. Pick up toys off of the floor and remove some of the excess furniture in your home to help make your home appear larger.

Deep cleaning your home is essential when preparing your home to sell. Ask your real estate agent for other tips to help make your home look more appealing to a potential buyer.


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