Embracing the 20/20 Decluttering Rule

Embracing the 20/20 Decluttering Rule

Like other decluttering rules, the 20/20 decluttering rule is a guideline to help you get your home decluttered and organized and teaches you how to maintain your decluttered home going forward. Specifically, the 20/20 rule maintains that if you can replace an item for under $20 in less than 20 minutes, then it's an item you can easily discard from your home. Of course, this rule can be flexible depending on your comfort level. The key with this rule is to use it for items that are not a regular part of your everyday living. For example, if you find a cord and you don't know what electronic device it belongs to, is it worth keeping it in a box or is it okay to recycle it and purchase a new one if you eventually discover the device it belongs to.

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How to Stage Your Home to Sell: A Room-By-Room Guide

How to Stage Your Home to Sell: A Room-By-Room Guide

When selling your home, it is important to consider the potential buyers that will be walking through your home and the environment they expect to see...one that is clean, decluttered and which they can see their families living in.

There are home staging tips that apply to all areas of the home. Once these are accomplished, follow the Living. Simplified. room-by-room guide, and your home will be ready for its photo shoot and open house in no time!

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Don’t Make These Home Staging Mistakes

Don’t Make These Home Staging Mistakes

Staging your home for sale is an important step when you’re selling your home to help potential buyers see themselves in your space. But when staging your home, it’s easy to make mistakes that can detract from your home. Be sure to avoid these all-to-common home staging errors.

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Benefits of Home Staging

Benefits of Home Staging

What is home staging and what do realtors mean when they talk about staging? Home staging is a method of preparing your home, both the interior and exterior, prior to selling your home. Staging is designed to highlight your home’s best assets, impress potential buyers, and help you sell your home quickly and for the best price.

Taking the time to stage your home, either by hiring a professional organizer or by taking on the task yourself, has many benefits, most importantly, allowing the prospective buyers to visualize themselves in your home.

Home staging makes your home more visually appealing and allows potential buyers to envision how the home might look with their own furniture, their own décor, and their own family living in the home. Generally, staged homes will sell for more than one that isn’t staged.

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How To Stage Your Home for a Quick Sale

How To Stage Your Home for a Quick Sale

If you’re getting ready to sell your home, making the effort to stage your home should be a top priority, whether you hire a professional organizer to help or if you want to tackle the job on your own. If time is limited, focus on staging the most popular rooms in the home including the master bedroom, family room, and master bathroom, as these are the areas that potential home buyers focus on the most when touring a home.

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Downsizing: Where to Start

Downsizing: Where to Start

When it comes to downsizing an entire lifetime of items in your home, the task can feel very overwhelming. By breaking down the project into bite-sized tasks, downsizing will become much more manageable.

Be sure to ask (and answer!) a few important questions as you get started: Are you moving with young children? Are you moving nearby or across the country? Will you have overnight guests in your new home? Will you be working or retired when you downsize? Having clear goals in mind will make the entire process that much easier and will help to guide you as you decide what to keep and what to discard.

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Daring to Downsize: You can’t take it all with you!

Daring to Downsize: You can’t take it all with you!

The proof is in the numbers. Did you know that the average home contains 200,000 to 300,000 items? Shocking, I know. But just take a look around you. Your kitchen has plates, cups, eating utensils, serving dishes, cookware, small appliances and so much more. Your home office has all the paper files you’ve collected over the years. Closets are filled to the brim with clothes, shoes and accessories. And then there are toys, sports equipment, home improvement items, craft items, seasonal home décor and so much more. When you really think about it, 200,000 items in the home doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.

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Questions to Ask Yourself When Decluttering or Downsizing

Questions to Ask Yourself When Decluttering or Downsizing

Have you recently decided that it’s time to downsize or maybe just get your home in order? You are not alone! There comes a time when we realize we don’t need to be taking care of a large home when only two people live in it. And what happens with all our stuff? Over time, we all accumulate so many items…we buy new sneakers but hold onto the old ones. We purchase a black t-shirt only to discover we already have six others. We bought a new kitchen appliance that we don’t like but we hold onto it “just in case.”

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