Make Your Bed, Hide the Cleaning Supplies: This Week's Home Hacks

The Housekeepers Have Spoken

The Guardian rounded up 14 expert rules for a clean, healthy, happy home from professional housekeepers, and the headline advice is exactly what your mother told you: make your bed, and be ruthless about what you keep.

I'm going to co-sign the "be ruthless" part harder than anything else in this post. In twenty-plus years of walking buyers through homes, clutter has cost my sellers more money than dated countertops ever did. Buyers don't do math on square footage — they feel square footage, and a full room feels smaller than an empty one every single time. If you're listing in the next six months, start purging now. Not staging. Purging. Different verb, much better result.

Two Storage Tricks Worth Stealing

House Digest flagged IKEA's GÅRDSBUTIK as a smarter, space-saving way to keep cleaning products out of sight — apparently it's developed a bit of a cult following. And in the "why didn't I think of that" category, they also covered turning an empty plastic water bottle into a garbage bag dispenser. Cut, stuff, pull one out at a time. Costs nothing. Works.

My professional angle on both: the space under your kitchen sink is one of the first cabinets a buyer opens at a showing. I've watched it happen a hundred times. A tangle of half-used sprays and a wad of grocery bags reads as "this house has not been maintained," fairly or not. Ten minutes of organizing under there does more for a buyer's impression than a new backsplash. I wish I were exaggerating.

The Fun One

Yahoo covered a DIY turning $5 thrifted cutting boards into shabby-chic plant holders. Cute, cheap, and genuinely charming on a wall or a shelf.

Now, my one caveat as the person who has to sell your house: personal DIY décor is for living, not for listing. What reads as "delightfully crafty" to you can read as "unfinished project" to a buyer walking through in eleven minutes. Do the cutting-board planters because they make you happy. Take them down before the photographer arrives. Both things can be true.

What This Means for NW Suburbs Sellers

Fall listing season is here, and our market in the NW suburbs rewards homes that show well — not homes that were expensively renovated. The gap between those two things is where most sellers waste money. Decluttering, organizing the visible storage, and cleaning like a professional housekeeper is coming over will get you further than a $12,000 project you'll never recoup. That's not me being cheap on your behalf. It's me having watched the comps for two decades.

Make the bed. Purge the closet. Hide the Windex. You're welcome. — Jenny