Preparing your home to sell: tips from Tidy Details

By Molly Milroy

Are you getting ready to sell your home? Overwhelmed with the project at hand and want some support?

Preparing your home to sell can be a daunting task and may include activities like organizing, decluttering and a deep clean, but completing these tasks can pay off.

Kaitlyn Beise is the owner of Tidy Details, a company that specializes in affordable and professional home staging and residential cleaning.

“The goal is to make your home appealing to the maximum number of potential buyers,” Beise said. “The ultimate goal is to sell quickly and for top dollar, so you have a competitive listing.”

If you are thinking of selling your home, here are some ways you can prepare it prior to listing.

Home staging

Preparing a home to sell can be overwhelming, but with the help of Beise and the Tidy Details team, it can turn an overwhelming project into a manageable one. Tidy Details offers home-staging services which can include anything from a deep clean to reorganizing the seller’s furniture to full vacantstaging services.

“We provide walk-and-talk staging consultations where we walk through and do a tour of people’s homes,” Beise explained. The walk-through gives sellers an opportunity to see what steps need to be accomplished prior to listing a home on the market.

“That includes decluttering, depersonalizing, furniture arrangement, color consulting,” she said. “We throw it all into a step-by-step report, so people feel really equipped to list their home.”

Based on the walk-through, they will recommend other specific services that might be beneficial.

“We can help with as little or as much as they feel that they need,” Beise said. “Sometimes it’s a clean. Sometimes it’s a clean and decluttering where we’ll clear off surfaces and center items of décor and do some light furniture rearranging. Sometimes we come in for a power stage, where we don’t bring in any inventory and we clean, arrange and stage to ensure that every room looks appropriate for photos.”

They also offer home staging with

Continued on page 20 final touches. This includes keeping the seller’s furniture in the home, but Tidy Details will bring in items like throw pillows, blankets, baskets, wall décor, bedding and more.

“We change the look of the house by just adding our soft inventory,” explained Beise, who is an accredited home-staging professional. “I became a buyer trends specialist so I can know what a specific property might benefit from.”

The final service offered by Tidy Details is full vacant-staging services. This is where they bring in all the furniture, bedding and décor, and set up the vacant home prior to real estate photos and showings.

Deep clean, depersonalize, declutter

“Deep clean, depersonalize and declutter” are the three most important tasks to prepare your home to sell.

Many things go into home staging, but the most important one, according to Beise, is a clean home.

“My No. 1 recommendation as a professional home stager is a good toothpick level clean,” Beise said.

Tidy Details started as a home-cleaning service in 2018 and has evolved to home staging, home organizing and residential-cleaning services.

“I think it’s really, really beneficial to clean. It shows that the property has been maintained.”

Depersonalizing and decluttering are two more important steps a seller should take.

“Depersonalizing is essential to home staging,” Beise said. “It is about transitioning your space from it being your home to a product about to hit the market. Depersonalizing is best explained as eliminating your personal tastes while still trying to make it feel warm and welcoming.”

It’s important to allow potential buyers the opportunity to envision themselves in the space. By freeing up space, it allows buyers to do just that.

As sellers prepare to move, depersonalizing can also be helpful as it allows one to slowly detach from the space.

“Sometimes I’ll suggest really quick, simple fixes,” she said, “like clearing off top surfaces of dressers and instead of having several picture frames, they have one centered plant or one

Experience sets us apart

centered item of décor.”

Another way to depersonalize the space is by removing family photos and replacing them with craft paper, which gives the appearance of wall art.

“People want to envision themselves in the home; they don’t want to think about who was living here,” Beise said.

After depersonalizing comes decluttering and organizing. Creating a clean, welcoming space allows future buyers to envision their own personal touches to the home.

“If you go through the trouble of decluttering, organizing and depersonalizing — if you go through that process, and even the interior closets and pantries, and things like that — you are going to make people feel like there is a place for everything and that there’s no storage issues in the home and that they are going to be neat and organized, too,” Beise said.

It’s not just about creating a warm and inviting space, it’s also about creating a lifestyle that buyers sense comes with the home.

“When you get this house, all of this comes with you,” Beise said, “the new home, the feel of the new home, the organizing, the cleanliness. It’s a fresh start.”

Creating space

Preparing your home for market doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Be sure to create a clean and uncluttered space, one that allows others to see themselves living there.

“The energy and the pain you can go through with home staging is going to pay off,” Beise said.

If you’re not ready for the task at hand, look to Tidy Details to help you with the process.

“It’s really a benefit to the seller to meet with a home stager, so they can know all that they can do to create urgency with their listing and get multiple competitive offers,” Beise said.

To see before-and-after videos of completed home-staging services, visit https://www.instagram.com/ details.tidy. D

Milroy is a Duluth freelance writer.