Want to sell your house? Then clean it up

You need to give your home the mother of all spring cleans if you're trying to sell or rent it. ALANNA GALLAGHERsweeps up all the information you need to get cracking

SO YOU’RE putting the family home up for sale and the mere mention of Marigold rubber gloves and getting down on hands and knees to scrub has people running for the hills. Every family member is suddenly extremely busy with anything that means not getting their hands dirty.

But someone has to grasp the nettle. The market is slow so how do you make your house shine out from the others? Two and three generations of furnishings, clutter and memories hide a house’s appeal to buyers – a breed already thin on the ground.

STORE

Readying a home for sale involves clearing the property of almost everything that once made it home – a challenging task that requires the help of as many professionals as you can afford.

House and Garden Presentation Services ((01-2011712, houseandgarden.ie) has readied around 4,000 homes for sale. During the boom its service helped people get a premium price, says owner Manny O’Hara. These days it helps push sales over the line.

Clutter in the home is the physical embodiment of baggage – something no buyer wants, says Sue Ryder of Cleaner Angels (087-7832803 cleanerangels.com). And the average family home is groaning under the weight of numerous life stages. Her decluttering service costs upwards of €300 per day and you still have to go through your stuff to determine what you’re going to bin, recycle or save. What it does do is help to get procrastinators off the fence, says Ryder.

It’s a false economy to put the stuff you remove into storage without going through it first. Your home’s belongings will be in storage for far longer than you envision so maybe it’s time to find them a new home before they cost you money that would be better spent elsewhere. One mover cites a client who returned from abroad and in an expensive piece of procrastination put his stuff in storage for three years at a cost of €15,000. When he was finally ready to move it from storage, what did he do? He threw every thing in the skip.

SELL OR RECYCLE

Most of us can’t afford to be that wasteful and need some type of storage facility. Prices vary depending on who you call. At Elephant (01-4940000, elephant.ie) , storage costs €157.02 per month for 100sq ft, a space big enough to take the contents of an average three-bedroom house. Storage World (01-4538000, storageworld.ie) charges €189 pm for the same size cage while Ballymount-based Space Self Storage (01-4299972, spacestorage.ie) charges €161 for the same square footage. These prices are for one month with VAT on top.

If you don’t want to store furniture, but think it might be worth something, have a member of the Irish Antique Dealers Association (IADA, iada.ie) take a look. Niall Mullen, (01-4538948 niallmullenantiques.com), vice-president of the IADA, will do call-outs within the Dublin area for as little as €100 but room-by-room inventories and written valuations will cost significantly more. A recent valuation of a Dublin house contents by an IADA member cost around €1,100. Save time and money by emailing images of the pieces to be valued, or for a free valuation today, call into James Adam auction house on St Stephen’s Green which is holding valuation day sessions today for paintings, siver porcelain etc, from 10am to 4pm. (01-67602561).

Want to clear a room entirely? Buckley’s of Sandycove (01-2805408) will have your furniture picked up and will deduct the cost from the proceeds. Auction day is Thursday. Oxfam Home will take some household items but are quite fussy so call in advance before going to the expense of hiring a van to deposit Aunt Mary’s old sideboard. Today being National Book Day it is worth noting that many houses have hidden treasures in their book shelves so it is worth calling in the experts. Appraisals by rare-books expert Fonsie Mealy, of Mealy’s Auctioneers (056-4441229, mealys.com) in Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, start from about €400.

Some second-hand shops welcome books and it is better to pass them on rather than dump them. This writer just recycled the entire contents of her library into her local St Vincent de Paul shop, which welcomed the new reads with open arms. But call first to ask what they will and won’t take.

SCRUB

Presentation remains paramount when selling a home, says Manny O’Hara. “In this market buyers are like speed-daters. They take 30 seconds to appraise your home and you want it to be love at first sight. Your home needs to look even better in real life than it does in the brochures. Forget photogenic, it needs to be ‘sellegenic’.”

This means scrubbing the interior so it shines like the proverbial new pin. This is dirty, time-consuming work and something that is worth paying a team of experts to do for you. It is money well spent. It prevents intra-sibling ructions and expedites the task – most cleaning services come with a posse of dirt desperadoes and will be in and out of your home in one day.

Cleaning services vary enormously depending on who you call and how dirty your house is. About Time (01-8480444 aboutime.ie) offers a professional residential cleaning service.

Its swat teams of liveried staff will clean all the kitchen cupboards, oven, inside fridge, as well as wardrobes and inside windows of an already decluttered and average-size three-bedroom house from €270 upwards.

Take up all offers of cleaning help from friends and family. Four or six hands are far better than two. You can use the notice boards of supermarkets and local shops to find well-priced cleaners but many of these will work alone. You can also find painters and carpenters this way.

The cleaners won’t declutter your wardrobes. On average we wear only ten per cent of our clothing. Recycle everything that hasn’t been worn in three years. Call your local St Vincent de Paul (SVP) or Simon shop and ask if they’re taking donations.

Hire a skip. You have more clutter than you think and skips are a relatively cheap way of ridding your home of everything from broken lawn mowers to half-empty pots of paint. Don’t be tempted to cut costs by ordering a mini-skip. Instead order the standard-size yellow metal kind that costs €169 for a five-day rental from A1 Waste (01-466 4444, a1waste.ie).

Kitchens and bathrooms sell houses and yours need to be pristine. Scratched laminate worktops should be replaced. Replacing kitchen doors is a cost-effective way to revitalise an existing design. Ikea (ikea.ie) have doors from €5. Entry-level PVC doors cost from €24 per door at In-House (in-house.ie).

Cleaning the oven can take days. Rombis Cleaning (1800-848700 rombiscleaning.ie) will clean ovens from €60. Rombis covers counties Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare and Meath.

Steam cleaning is especially good for kitchens and grouting. Hire Here (01-4534288 hirehere.ie) charges €36.30 per day for a steam cleaner and will deliver within the greater Dublin area.

Bathrooms also need to look and feel spotless. Re-grout any dirty-looking tiling. Also, remove all sealant around the bath, sink and shower and replace. Clean shower doors ’til they shine.

Make sure all light fixtures are in working order, replace any that are not and put bulbs into all lamps and lights. Don’t show rooms with bare bulbs. Plain, neutral coloured lampshades can be purchased from as little as €10 a shade.

SURVEY

Have your home BER rated (seai.ie). This is essential for either sale or rental and can be a selling point if your home is well insulated.

Don’t forget the property’s kerb appeal, says Fiona McLoughlin, whose website Privateseller.ie also allows sellers to sell their homes themselves.

The first thing a would-be buyer will see is your front garden and facade. This outdoor space needs to look verdant and pristine. Hire a power hose to clean mildew from outside walls, spruce up patio and brick work and clean railings or boundary walls. Minimise leakage by blocking up doors and letterboxes with old towels before you start. You can even use the hose to clean the outside windows.

Before you start readying a home for sale, construct a time-table of how long you think it’s going to spend and triple it. This is how long, in reality, it will take amateurs to co-ordinate the comings and goings of tradesmen, to ensure they do everything they’ve been contracted to do and to clean up each and every mess they make. The experience will take your relationship to breaking point so try and count to 10 rather than explode, otherwise you’ll get nothing done. Add to this the fact that during each task you will uncover other small jobs that need doing, all eating into precious preparation time. It’s little wonder they say moving house is one of the most stressful things you’ll ever experience.

Finally, make sure the photographs taken by your sales agent accurately reflect your house. If the rooms look small and dark, ask them to take a fresh batch.

Finally, it’s worth noting that women still make most of the house-buying decisions, says O’Hara, and that we buy with our senses. All the cliched activities – brewing coffee, baking bread and putting fresh flowers into vases – do actually help conjure up a sense of home. O’Hara takes this one step further. She spritzes aftershave into the front doorframe because it subliminally draws women to the house. She won’t say what brand works best but admits that in the current market it’s an intangible extra that helps expedite the sale.

It’s a sad fact of life that you will fall back in love with your home once it is all spruced up. “That’s the idea,” says Manny. “You want someone to fall so in love with it that they want to buy it.”

The people who'll help:

* Clean, declutter and neutralise colour is the mantra of Fiona McLoughlin of Private Seller (086-8274433, privateseller.ie), She charges a how-to-stage your home for sale consultation fee of €195 and works within the Greater Dublin area.

* House and Garden Presentation Services (01-2011712, houseandgarden.ie) have readied 4,000 homes for sale and offer a free no-obligation consultation on what to do with your home. In addition they will do decluttering, store your excess furniture for you and dress the house with furniture you then live with, where necessary. They will also dress beds and fit curtains and roman blinds. This service costs approximately €3,000 for a three-to-four bedroom house for a period of three months.

* 1800 Moving, formerly uPak (1800-668464, upak.ie), has a deal with Storeit (01-4299555, store-it.ie). The contents of the average three-bedroom house will take up 100 sq ft and typically cost €175 per month. Moving the contents of an average three-bedroom house takes approximately four hours and costs €360.

* Want to move yourself? The company will deliver a moving pack to your door. It costs €120 and consists of 30 large double-wall boxes, strong enough to be stacked and keep breakables secure; 15 metres of bubble wrap, 300 sheets of tissue paper and three rolls of packing tape.

* A standard skip from A1 Waste (01-4664444 a1waste.ie) costs €169.

*For heavy-duty DIY jobs you'll need heavy duty tools. A-Z Hire (01-4502915 azhire.ie) will deliver tools, such as floor-sanders, steam cleaners and more on a Saturday and pick up on Monday. You pay for one day's use but get the weekend to use the tools.