Preparing for holiday guests when your house for sale

Below is an excerpt from the @properties blog, where I am featured. 

Selling your home during the holiday season can add stress to an already busy time of the year. While selling your home over the holidays has its advantages, it also means you may need to modify how you deck the halls, prepare your home and entertain guests.

If you’re selling your home over the holidays, we have a few tips to help you as you host those traditional gatherings and simultaneously find that perfect buyer.

Keep your holiday decorations simple

If your house is on the market, you have already (hopefully) pared down each room, removing clutter, both visual and physical. If you plan on having a Christmas tree, there are a few things that you can do to make life easy on yourself.

David Jablonowski suggests decorating and entertaining as you normally would — tradition is tradition, after all, but says to keep it simple wherever possible — including skipping the authentic tree in favor of an artificial one.

“Use an artificial tree so that you aren’t hurriedly vacuuming errant pine needles in the moments prior to a showing. If you have a large tree, try to keep it to a visual minimum, decorating with simple white lights and keeping ornament color to one or two.

You want to ensure that the home does not feel crowded, and that potential buyers can walk around easily, so consider taking a piece of furniture out of the room to compensate for the addition of a tree.

Keep other decor to a minimum; a simple wreath on the door and a glass bowl of silver ornaments can still deliver a festive look without overpowering the rest of the home.

Resist the desire to fill the mantle of your fireplace with a lighted ceramic holiday village, avoid electric trains around the tree (easy to trip on), and if the presents under the tree start to spill out into the rest of the room, you might want to store some of them until Christmas Day.

Keep in mind that you’ll be packing up all of these things soon enough if you are moving, so get ahead of the game by opting to forego the holiday tablecloth, Santa bedsheets, and that vintage sled.

Instead, think of how excited you will be to see these in your new home next season.”

My Mother knew how to make Christmas 1969 pretty darn fabulous!

My Mother knew how to make Christmas 1969 pretty darn fabulous!

Source: https://www.atproperties.com/blog/2017/11/...