Cull your stuff to sell your home
Downsizing, or getting ready to stage your home for sale? You need to strap on your big-kid pants and get radical about clutter, writes
If you want to maximise your sale price – and minimise the exhausting job of packing, it’s time to think Marie Kondo on steroids.
‘‘Generally New Zealanders used to live in their houses their whole life, so they have a lot of clutter,’’ says Wellington-based homestager and interior designer Hazel Maurer, of Staged for Sale.
‘‘Still, anybody who stays in a house for more than three years accumulates a whole heap of possessions and removing a great percentage of the possessions before they sell is a great idea.’’
Clearing as much out of your home as possible can even help you with the sale.
‘‘If somebody says I want $2.5 million for my house, but you go to their place and they have old, ugly couches, it just won’t be perceived as in that price range. One of the key things to think about when decluttering to sell your home is trying to depersonalise it.
‘‘Agents tend not to have a problem if clients put stuff in their garages because buyers can still see what they can fit in a garage with stuff in it.’’
If you’re planning on staging your home, Maurer suggests starting by packing away all family photos, nicknacks and mementoes from travel. Strip everything back to the bare essentials.
Then you can start culling larger pieces of furniture.
‘‘Sometimes people see a piece of furniture and go, ‘Oh my god, I love that’. Then they make a space for it as opposed to having a space for it. They don’t have a vision of how it will go with everything in their place.’’
This is your clarion call to stop doing that, and to get rid of anything that you’re not 100% in love with.
Make sure you know the dimensions of the place you’re moving to and have a vision of how you want it to look.
Make decisions on what furniture you take with you with that vision firmly in mind.
It might help to make a floor plan of your new home with dimensions of the space and your existing furniture, so you can accurately decide what large items to keep, store, donate, or sell, and what you might need to replace with smaller items.
If you’re downsizing, and need to let go of a significant amount of possessions, this process might be a painful, emotionally draining exercise.
Nelson-based professional organiser Marrit WalstraRussell, founder of Tidy Tulip, is in the process of helping an elderly couple downsize from their four-bedroom family home to a two-bedroom cottage in a retirement village.
That task is compounded by the fact they left the process a
little late – there’s only a matter of weeks to cull their possessions down to a few boxes.
‘‘Start early, as soon as you know that you’re going to move,’’ says Walstra-Russell, and don’t fall prey to sentimentality.
‘‘A lot of people hold on to stuff because of guilt, because it has been a gift from someone. Everyone’s got something in the house that they’ve been gifted and think, ‘oh gosh, I should keep this because so-and-so gave it to me’. But you don’t have to do that.’’
She suggests taking a photo and keeping that instead.
‘‘You’ve got the memory, but let the item go. Someone else will buy it and love it, and that purchase will go to the hospice or to the Red Cross or [another worthy charity].’’
It is crucial to have a plan of
attack, to help you cope when the emotions get too big. Start with items in storage that you’re not using every day, and build up to the more personal things.
‘‘Start with the junk cupboard you don’t really look at,’’ says Lower Hutt-based professional organiser Alaina Dalzell, of Tidy Life Solutions. ‘‘You’re not likely to need that stuff, but you’re going to get a good sense of achievement having gone through it.’’
Agood rule of thumb for decluttering junk drawers and hall cupboards is the 20/20 rule, a technique coined by minimalists Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus for tackling ‘‘just in case’’ items – the indeterminate length of string you’re keeping ‘‘just in case’’. If it costs less than $20 and would take 20 minutes to replace, get rid of it.
This can be crucial when decluttering the kitchen, which is often full of single-purpose items.
‘‘The breadmaker can go – get rid of all those larger singlepurpose appliances, try to get ones where you can do multiple things in one. Kitchens are quite easy, and they’re a quick win.’’
Starting in places you don’t use regularly can also be quick wins because you know you’re not likely to need the things you’ve stored there, ‘‘you haven’t actually looked at it for years and there is no point moving it because it’s not going to fit in the new space’’.
Dalzell also advocates starting far earlier than you might think you need to, so you might only need to focus on decluttering – and packing as you go – for 20 minutes to an hour a day, taking bite-sized chucks out of the massive task, rather than being overwhelmed by it.
‘‘Do 20 minutes to half an hour a day, whatever you can manage, just start going through things and adding to that pile and don’t look in the boxes again once you’ve made the decision.
‘‘Have a designated space where you can put your piles of stuff to be donated. So once you have 20 boxes, you do one trip to the op shop. Don’t make it harder than you need to.’’
‘‘Have a designated space where you can put your piles of stuff to be donated. So once you have 20 boxes, you do one trip to the op shop.’’ Alaina Dalzell