What to fix before selling your house: the cosmetic list

First, what this list is not

This is not repair advice, and it is not an inspection. If the furnace is old, the roof is near the end of its life, a tap drips, or a deck board is soft, those are condition questions, not presentation questions. Talk to your agent about how your market handles them, and talk to a licensed inspector or the right trade about the work itself. Nothing on this page is a substitute for that.

It is also not a renovation plan. The question here is narrower: what can you fix about how the house presents, without opening a wall, pulling a permit, or hiring a trade? That turns out to be most of what buyers react to in the first twenty minutes.

Fix one: the density

The single biggest cosmetic problem in most lived-in houses is that there is too much in them. Not mess, just volume. Bookshelves at capacity, counters at capacity, closets at capacity. Capacity reads as small.

Go room by room and remove a third to a half of what is on every open surface and shelf. Box it, label it, and store it off-site or in one tidy corner of the basement. This is the fix that makes every other fix visible, and it doubles as the first third of your packing.

Pay attention to floors. If you can see the floor of every closet and a clear walking path through every room, you are done. If you cannot, you are not.

Fix two: the arrangement

Rooms photograph the way they are arranged, and most rooms are arranged for living, not for looking. The sofa blocks the window. The dining table sits off-centre under the light. The bed is the first thing the doorway frames, sideways.

Walk to the doorway of each room and take a photo with your phone. The doorway is where the photographer and every buyer will stand. Whatever the photo shows is what the room is, as far as the listing is concerned. Move furniture until that photo makes sense: a clear path in, the best feature of the room visible, nothing tall blocking light.

Then remove one piece of furniture from the two most crowded rooms. There is always a piece that can go. Rooms with fewer, ordinary-sized pieces read bigger than rooms full of furniture, even when the square footage is identical.

Fix three: the light

Dark houses photograph sad, and the fix is mostly bulbs and glass. Walk through at dusk and replace every burnt or dim bulb. While you are at it, make the bulbs in each room the same colour temperature, because a warm lamp next to a cool ceiling light makes photos look patchy in a way nobody can name but everybody notices.

Wash the windows, inside and out, on the sides of the house that face the camera and the street. Dust the blinds. On photo day and for every showing, every blind is fully open and every light is on, even at noon. Photographers will tell you the same thing.

Heavy drapes that block a third of the window can come down for the listing period. Bare windows with clean trim let in more light than any curtain arrangement.

Fix four: the surfaces

Buyers read surfaces as evidence of how the house was kept. The good news is that most tired surfaces are dirty, not damaged, and dirty is fixable with a weekend.

Walls: wipe the scuffs at switch height, in the stairwell, and behind dining chairs. A melamine sponge lifts most of them. Doors, handles, and baseboards in the main hallways are worth the same treatment.

Kitchen and bathroom: cabinet fronts, appliance fronts, taps polished, grout scrubbed where it shows, a fresh shower curtain liner if the old one has discoloured at the hem. Clear silicone that is peeling at the tub edge can be redone neatly in an afternoon by a handy person.

Floors: a proper vacuum with the crevice tool along the edges, then a mop. If the carpet has not been professionally cleaned in years, that is the one surface spend worth considering before photos.

What to leave alone

Anything that needs a permit, a trade, or more than two weekends: leave it. A half-finished project is worse than an honest dated room, and a rushed one is worse than both. Buyers can imagine new counters more easily than they can forgive crooked tile.

The same goes for chasing your taste. You do not need to make the house look like a magazine. You need it to look clean, bright, and looked after. That is a cleaning and editing job, and it is exactly the job the four fixes above describe.

Common questions