Why should you turn to your accountant for home improvement tips? Well, if you’re considering selling, we have some tips that can definitely help you get the best price (and maybe even raise the value)!
The appearance of your home from the outside (known as “curb appeal”) definitely matters when you’re putting your house on the market. There’s a reason why home listings all have pictures, the better your home looks, the better it will sell.
Here are suggestions to improve the appearance of your home:
- Wash it! Things get dusty and dirty over time, and the outside of your house probably spends all of its time outside! (Tautologies for the win!) Go look at your house, does anything look grimy? Many houses will have trim, spouts, gutter, and garage doors that may be a lighter color and they may be especially likely to look a bit “meh” after a few years of wind and rain.
- Paint it! You don’t even have to go with the colors that you like, maybe there are new popular colors that you can’t stand that will make your house look updated and new! Even if you just touch up existing colors, this is a great way to make things shiny!
- Replace it! Are your mailbox, doorbell, fixtures, house numbers and other outdoor hardware in good condition? If cleaning or painting something isn’t enough, you might need to replace something to get it to look its best.
- Mow it! Mow your lawn before pictures are taken or before an open house! Obviously!
- Landscape it! Adding a tree or a bush can add interest to your yard, or perhaps cover up a patch of grass that just doesn’t look right. Flowers are a great touch to a yard, or even in window boxes. Avoid paving everything over in concrete.
- Light it! You can get moderately inexpensive lights to line a sidewalk or driveway, and solar powered ones don’t even need to be plugged in. They can make your house look great (and expensive) and really make interesting textures (like a brick or flagstone path) really pop in a picture!
- . . . Art it? Ok, this category title needs some work, but some tasteful outdoor art like a birdbath or rock arrangement or sculpture can make you look like the outdoorsy home-improvement loving people that you want your buyer to think that you are.
- Fence it! There may be a part of your yard that you can’t make look better, so think about adding a nice fence, railing, or wall to remove it from view.
- Pave it! Not the whole yard (see point 5!) but you may want to go over a cracked driveway with patches and then refinish the surface to make it look neat.
- Hide it! Your trash bins, that is! Everyone needs them but no one wants to look at them. Use that fence from point 8 to obscure them, or hide them in your garage, if you have one.
It’s not easy to view your own home from the perspective of a stranger, but it might be easier if you have a friend over to dinner and ask them what they think. Make sure that you’re ready to hear the answer though: if your friend is honest about what they don’t like about your house they’re just trying to help you, not criticize you personally!
Good luck in selling your house . . . and talk to your accountant before you do it! It can be a huge freaking deal with regard to your taxes, and you need to be absolutely sure that your paperwork is in order before you sell your house.