What to Fix Before You List, and What to Leave Alone

Sellers usually arrive with a list. Some of it is worth doing. A lot of it is not, and the difference is not obvious from inside the house.

Do the paint

Of everything on the list, paint does the most for the least money.

Whole rooms in a strong neutral, ceilings and trim included where they need it. Not an accent wall. Not a color you love. A buyer walking through is doing arithmetic in their head about how much work the place needs, and fresh paint stops that arithmetic before it starts.

If you do nothing else on this page, do the paint.

Fix what a buyer will read as neglect

Small broken things are expensive out of proportion to what they cost to repair, because buyers generalize from them. A running toilet, a sticking door, a dead bulb in the hall, a torn screen, a loose railing. Each is twenty minutes. Together they tell a story about how the roof was probably maintained.

Grading and gutters belong in this category too. Water at the foundation is the single fastest way to lose a buyer in this area, and around here it is usually a downspout that ends four inches from the wall.

Empty it out before you stage it

Most houses do not need furniture brought in. They need about a third of the furniture taken out.

Rooms photograph and show larger when the traffic path is clear and the surfaces are bare. Closets sell a house, and a closet you can see the back of reads as twice the size. Put half of what is in yours into a storage unit for six weeks.

Skip the kitchen

Do not remodel a kitchen to sell. A full remodel rarely earns back what it costs, and you will pick finishes for a buyer you have not met.

The exception is small: worn cabinet hardware, a broken drawer slide, a faucet from 1998. Those are a few hundred dollars and they land.

Skip the carpet, usually

New carpet in a house that is otherwise dated does not read as new carpet. It reads as new carpet in a dated house.

If the existing carpet is clean and intact, have it professionally cleaned and price accordingly. If it is genuinely bad, a credit at closing often makes more sense than replacing it, because the buyer would rather choose.

The part that is hard to see from inside

After enough years in a house you stop seeing it. The wall you always meant to deal with becomes invisible. The furniture arrangement that made sense when the kids were small stays put.

This is the part I walk through with sellers before anything goes on the market, and it is a design conversation before it is a listing conversation.