So I’m planning to put my house on the market in May of this year. I have three kids, two cats, and a dog along with my wife and I all living there. How in the heck do I keep the house presentable enough for sale to prospective buyers? The market is a mess right now and some homes on my street have been for sale for more than a year. I can’t imagine trying to keep my place in top condition for that long, I really need to to sell in weeks rather than months or years. Its in pretty good shape and I’m planning to move the bulk of my stuff into storage while the house is for sale. I’m looking for advice that will help me sell quickly and any tricks you may have heard of on keeping the house presentable while we’re all living there when its for sale. Thanks!
Board the pets, while the house is on the market.
Limit the amount of toys the kids have and start a regimen of picking up.
Exactly. Start the kids on the road to neat-freakery today. If you try to do it overnight the day before it goes on the market there will be trouble.
If they’re old enough, you might try taking them to see some new-construction model houses about your size. Odds are they’ll like the look if for no other reason than it’s new & shiny. Then make a game of “How much can we make our house look like that?” They may rise to the bait. Or they may not. The good news in that case is that you outweigh the little beggars and your Word can be Law if you insist.
Sad to say, what sells houses quickly nowadays is price. As in much-lower-than-your-neighbors price.
A nice clean-up & declutter certainly helps. But when nothing much is moving you may need to price to the wholesale (read rip-off) buyer.
I tried to sell my place last summer. No kids, no pets, it looks like a model every day. Exclusive neighborhood with very low turnover & no comps on the market. Everybody who saw it loved the place. Gots lots of compliments on the feedback. And lots of traffic on the open houses. But no offers. Everybody said “Whack off $100K and *then *we’ll think about offering somewhere below that.” And the price we set was selected by the local real estate guru as the “right price for the current market.” This wasn’t a case of us picking our 2006 fantasy price.
Nowadays sell fast = dump it I’m afraid.
I can’t see boarding all of the pets the whole time, that would amount to thousands of dollars in boarding and I wouldn’t feel right leaving there for weeks or months on end. They’re part of the family. I could bring them to my parent’s house when its being shown but they’ll have to stay at home on the other days.
I do like the idea of getting the kids involved by showing them new houses but they’ve all young (5, 3, and 9mths) so their ability to participate in keeping clean in limited. I’m lucky when they don’t break new things let alone clean up!
So far I’ve got price the house well below market value and grab my ankles…sigh. 
Pets are one of the biggest detractors to a home’s value. Even if the buyer’s have pets, they know what kind of damage pets can do.
The big problem with showing a house where a bunch of kids live is that they inevitably have so much stuff that the house looks crammed and therefore smaller than it really is. Take away a lot of the kids’ toys and clothes (with assurances that they’ll get them back). Similarly, take away a lot of your own clothes; this makes your closets look roomy and shows the kids that you’re sharing in the sacrifice.
Can the cats live with your parents for the time being, so as to get them and the litter box out of the house? If the animals have to stay, can they be confined during the day? At least keep them out of the master bedroom.
It would probably be worth it to invest in having a cleaning service come through every (or at least every other) Thursday or Friday.
Great tips for making some space, I will definately be doing that. In fact the clutter is the biggest impediment to even cleaning the place up…its been a game of musical chairs moving stuff from one room to the next to “clean.” I’m going to rent storage but its around $200 a month for even a small space so I’m trying to hold out as long as I can before it goes on the market.
I like the idea of a cleaning service to come by periodically as well. Thanks for the tips!
Judging by the OP’s username, I would hazard a guess that certain, uh, items should most definitely be put away… 
If you need to sell so quickly, why isn’t it on the market already?
What a buyer wants is to see how they could live in a house. The more of you in the house they see, the less of them they’ll see. So clear out all those photos of the kids and the family. Keep some pieces of generic art and decoration around, but think more like what you’d see in a hotel. If you have young kids, you probably have their scribbling all over the refrigerator - get that off to somewhere that can’t be seen.
Make sure you get out any furniture that is constricting movement. You may be willing to work around some tight spots, but it will leave an impression of “small” on the buyers. The same tip has been offered with closets. Apply it to your kitchen cabinets as well. In fact, one real estate agent I know recommends keeping enough dishes for only one meal. Not only will you de-clutter your cabinets, but you’ll have no choice except to wash them after every meal.
And the 5-yr-old is old enough to pick up after him/herself. My brother and I took forever doing it, and offered lots of resistance, but we could put all of our clothes and toys away at that age.
A co-worker went through this with 2 kids about the age of yours.
A couple of things she mentioned:
Storage bins for the kids’ toys, that will fit in the closet or under the bed. Pull out one bin for the kids to play with. When they are done, it all goes back in the bin and under the bed.
Paper plates and disposable cups. She got a number of last minute showing requests, and they seemed to get the call during dinner. Using paper plates meant that all of the dishes went into the garbage when they finished eating. No worrying about dirty dishes in the sink.
off topic, but may I ask: why does a house have to look like a museum to sell?
When I go house shopping, I prefer to see how a family lives there…
A normal, day-to-day “mess” is fine with me. I want to actually see the details, not try to imagine what it will look like.
Let me step over the kid’s toys! Is there enough room between the bed and the chest of drawers for a kid to sit down and play with his blocks, or will I have to let him build a tower in the living room?
Let me see the teenager’s jeans tossed on the towel rack in the bathroom! If I can stand at the sink and still ignore the jeans, I don’t have to spend 5 minutes deciding whether the bathroom is big enough , trying to compare it to my mental picture of my current house.
The biggest reason for me that a house should be tidy and clean if I were to buy it is that my house is always tidy and mostly clean. (People often ask if we are selling our house when they drop by, I take it as a compliment.) That means if you have a pile of dirty laundry on what is potentially going to be my floor, I am less interested in in becoming my floor. There is a yuck factor for some of us.
Also, if there is loads of stuff around, the place looks smaller. It isn’t but it looks that way. So, when you try to picture your own stuff fitting in the space, it won’t in your head.
There are definitely limits. A couple of dirty dishes from supper, a kid who didn’t put their laundry from that day in the hamper that’s all fine and good but it had better be a ‘we didn’t get a chance to pick up TODAY’ kind of thing not a ‘we NEVER pick up or clean and you are going to have to deal with that level of maintenance on the rest of the house’ kind of thing.
Sorry, useful advice for the OP, take 15 minutes each night and tidy the house. That means putting everything where it belongs nd giving the flat surfaces (kitchen counters, bathroom counters, tables) a quick wipe. If you can’t tidy in 15 minutes, it will be for one of two reasons:
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You don’t have enough storage for your stuff.
Solution A: get rid of some of it. You are going to be moving soon so start packing. You will be surprised what you don’t need anymore.
Solution B: Get more storage. Even if it is just cheap stacking bins, it makes your house look way better if it is out of sight. And everything in your house should have a home.
(FWIW, I like solution A better.) -
You have taken out too much stuff during the day without putting it away. This is very easy to do with little ones taking up much of your time. The only real solution to this is that every activity has a new final step that is clean up. Clean up after dinner, after playtime, after snack, etc. Sadly, your kids are too little to help out very much but they will see you doing it and start helping in a couple of years.
As a bonus for all your hard work, you will get to live in a neater, tidier home yourself. You will know where everything is. It’s just a nice feeling.
Are you going to buy the OP’s house?
If not, then most people when shopping for homes are turned off by messy houses, and the OP will have greater success in appealing to prospective buyers if the house is neat and tidy when shown.
People shopping for a new house are aspirational - they are looking to improve their lives. A neat/clean house is probably neater/cleaner than their own - it fulfills their desire for an improvement on their current lives.
I agree with Icarus, you need to give them a house that they can’t dislike as much as you are giving them a house that they like. Watch the TLC/H&G shows about people viewing houses, they say inane things about the wallpaper and paint colors or bedrooms being too small. These aren’t real concerns, these are their inability to see themselves living there. So be innocuous as possible.
It’s not that bad Bongmaster. I agree with everyone else- start early with getting things nice and neat and you’ll all get used to it.
A couple of hints:
- Every night 10 minutes before bed, put EVERYTHING away.
- Living room (first room in the house) becomes off limits to kids- no toys, no food, no presence
- Get a light, easy to use vacuum- 5 minutes of vacuuming can cover all the major floors very well
- Empty out the master bedroom- nothing on dressers
- Get rid of all the stuff you don’t need now (clothes, books, strollers, etc.) You will be storaging lots and then moving so you don’t want it around in the future so get rid of it now.
- Each child gets one toybox. Everything goes into it and the lid closes- every night. This can wait until house on market but be prepared to do the selection.
- Pets all go in kennels significant hours a day now. Get them used to it. When house is being shown they are in the garage/shed/car, all bowls and other traces are GONE. (We kept our dog restricted to only the kitchen with plywood “doors” that were taken to the garage when we took him out there).
- Kitchen is probably the biggest key. We went down to 6 place settings and everything else in storage. Get rid of high-chair and move to a booster seat. At night, counters should be completely barren (no coffee makers or toasters- we put ours in storage). All dishes into the dishwasher.
- Use only one bathroom, not the good one.
This is all to prepare for the fact that if everything is clean at night, it takes about 10-15 minutes to return it to cleanliness every day upon a phone call that an agent was coming by.
Our broker said, you want the buyer to know that someone lives here and loves it, but you want them to see their own lives into the house. She believes that clean bathrooms aren’t as important as open, non-ornamented space.
Her method seems to work as we sold our houses in August '09 and October '10. The first on the market for 6 days, the second for 8.
This is why. I see a messy dirty house and I assume that the homeowners are as careless with the maintenence.
OP don’t rent a storage unit. Take the opportunity now to purge, purge, purge. Less stuff to move in the end.
For ideas of how your house should look, spend a couple of weekends going to open houses in your area. Notice the ones that have a fresh, open, appealing feel. Note the lack of clutter, personal items and bulky furniture. Notice the nics smell and sbsolute spotless cleaning in the kitchen. Notice the extra-bright lightbulbs, the freshly painted walls and trim. Then go make your house like that.
Shop around for storage areas. Ours is about $70 a month - we moved our stuff from our old one when it went up to over $110 a few years ago. But given how much more you might get for a clean house, even $200 a month is a bargain. I don’t think boarding the pets is a good idea, though.
We sold our house in one day - there was an offer after our open house. We had kids, but no pets. We did it by renting a storage area and moving almost everything to it, including most of the stuff in the attic. (We did have some boxes in the attic, but they were neatly arranged.) We also painted just before we sold, and made sure everything looked clean, in good order, and in good shape. The market was much better then, but we were the talk of the town’s real estate agents. It came in handy when the buyers started to get obnoxious, because our agent told them that they could back out, and he’d sell the house in a day again.
When we bought our house, we were amazed at how many people showed the house as a total shambles. One had a hole in the wall, one had a room totally filled with junk to the point we couldn’t even get in, and one had a lovely master bath ruined by dirty laundry strewn all over it. I don’t care how they live in the house, I only care how we would live in the house, and it is a lot easier to see that when you can actually see the floor and walls. Ever go into a sample house for a new development? It doesn’t have laundry and toys spread around. In fact the one near us did all sorts of tricks to make the room look bigger, like smaller beds and taking off doors to the bedrooms.
Cite? Given the number of people with pets, this is hard to believe. If the carpets are stained, yeah, it is a problem Dogs should be penned or taken for a walk when the house is shown, of course - but it is usually better for the current residents to take themselves for a walk also.