Are you trying to sell your home late in the summer season? With the help of professional home stagers, you can sell your home any time of year. Set To Show, a Minneapolis provider of home staging services, has some summer-specific tips on making your home look its best.
Keeping Up with Finicky Weather
We all know how late-summer Minnesotan weather is. One day the tar is boiling and the next it rains so hard that you can’t see three feet in front of your face. August’s weather can get incredibly warm. As a home seller, it can be tricky to maintain a comfortable environment for your potential buyers, as you have to be ready to change approaches at the drop of a hat. How do you even begin to keep your home comfortable and consistent when the late-summer weather outside is anything but?
● Keep your thermostat consistent. Your goal with your home’s temperature should be to make it unnoticeable. Your staging should be what shines here! If it’s a hot, late-summer day, however, buyers might feel relieved to enter an air-conditioned building, but that should be the extent of the attention paid to the temperature. You don’t want them to think there’s a heating or cooling problem! As a general rule of thumb, 72 degrees is a comfortable room temperature for many people; just make sure you give your thermostat enough time to get your home to that temperature before showing.
● Ditch the fans. Yes, we know late summer can get toasty, but fans do nothing to fix that problem. They don’t really do anything to cool the air; they simply move it around. Moreover, they’re terribly noisy (and thus distracting), and they also have a tendency to spoil the composition and aesthetic of a room. With the exception of a ceiling fan on low, such pieces of clunky and ineffective equipment have no place in a put-together home.
● Open up! If the weather has been hot, as August tends to be, you might have been keeping your windows shut to let your air conditioner do its job. Indoor air can get stale when a house is closed up over time. You don’t want them to think that there’s poor air circulation in the house! If you’ve got a cooler day approaching, do yourself and the environment a favor: cut the AC and throw open those windows. Your home’s air quality will feel so much better afterward!
● Mind the stink. With excessive August heat comes excessive stench—pet odors, gym clothes, garbage cans, you name it, all of them seem to smell worse when they’ve been cooking in the sun. Obviously, a smelly home isn’t an appealing one, so make sure to stay on top of the cleaning! In particular, be mindful of the garbage cans outside. Your exterior is the first thing people notice about your home, and a smelly garbage can does not make a good welcome wagon.
Cranking up the Curb Appeal
“Curb appeal” is a term that describes how attractive to potential buyers a house looks from the outside. If somebody says your home has good curb appeal, that’s a high compliment! It means that you’ve worked hard at your house’s upkeep, and, in that person’s opinion, it has paid off.
Having good curb appeal is especially important if your home is on the market. Good curb appeal communicates pride in ownership, which influences how people feel about your home. It says they can trust you and that you have taken good care of your home.
A manicured lawn and well-kept siding not only increase your selling price, but they also leave a good impression on potential buyers and set the bar for how the inside of your home will look. In other words, a disheveled exterior suggests your interior will look the same way—even if it truly doesn’t.
First impressions matter! However, curb appeal can be hard to maintain when, again, the weather won’t cooperate. August heat and rainy spells can make landscaping downright miserable on some days and near impossible on others. How on earth, with all these obstacles, are you to keep your home’s exterior in prime selling condition?
● Understand the financial importance of a well-kept lawn. It can be difficult to find the motivation to do landscaping when it’s so hot that you could cook an egg on the sidewalk, or so rainy that water soaks through your shoes. However, remind yourself that in selling your home, you’re selling not just the interior, but the location and view, as well. Use this idea to defy the August weather and fuel bursts of yard work.
● Prioritize and distract. In an ideal world, even in the busy summer months, you will have had enough time or money to keep your lawn green and lush. However, life happens, and this year in particular has been hard on plants. If you can’t maintain both your front and back lawns, invest the majority of your time in the front one, as that’s often the first thing potential buyers see when they drive up. Invest in planters and keep them watered to distract the eye from any brown patches the moody August weather may have wrought upon your lawn.
● Clean your door and windows. Though you probably did your big clean in the spring, the humidity this month has opened up the door for late summer dirt and mildew. Moreover, on the rare dry day, that sort of weather tends to make the dirt smudges on your windows all the more obvious. It pays, literally, to clean things up at this time of year.
Overwhelmed? Consider Occupied Home Staging Services
It’s a tough task getting a home on the market, especially with all that late-summer busyness, and especially if your home is still occupied. Luckily, Set to Show can help. We’re a Minneapolis homeowner staging services firm with a over a decade of experience doing what we love— and what we love is prepping homes to sell. To see what our services can do for both your home and your pocketbook, contact us today at 952-224-2131.