After you tick all the check boxes on your to-do list – remember: details matter.

The first detail of any open home that shouldn’t be noticed is a strong smell of your home. Since you’ve lived there for a long time, you don’t smell the spices in the kitchen, the damp smell in the bathroom, or the odour of your pets, or maybe the chemical smell of the new paint. Be sure that your potential buyers can be immediately turned off by those specific odours.

So when you are busy repainting the house, getting it staged, mowing the lawns, remember to open the windows for ventilation and put some scented candles or room diffuser to make your home smell fresh and neutral.

So when you are busy repainting the house, getting it staged, mowing the lawns, remember to open the windows for ventilation and put some scented candles or room diffuser to make your home smell fresh and neutral.

Check all the small hardware in your house and fix the broken ones, things like door handles, window locks, and cabinet hinges, again because every detail counts to a positive overall impression.

Don’t forget to clean things that are ‘invisible’, like window glass, your storage areas and wardrobe. Kitchen cabinets are very easy to be forgotten, especially when you have millions things on your mind. Home buyers will want to check out your house storage capacity, the least thing you want them to see is dead spiders or mould and water marks from a earlier plumbing problem.

If you are going to have your house vacant or will be taking out some unnecessary furniture, one last detail you should watch out for is the furniture trace on the carpet. Try to cover them with a rug or another piece of furniture. If you have to leave the area empty, a quick way to fix furniture marks on the carpet is to put a towel over the mark and iron the towel, the heat should bring up most of the pile, but never put the iron directly on the carpet!