Selling your home advice

Part 4

The following article gives essential selling your home advice. How you can stimulate the potential house buyer's senses to sell your home quickly through visual and mental appeal.

Your eyes, vision and sight
Think about whether you have a target market; is it the eco elite, first time buyers etc. What can you do to your home to visually appeal to your target market or as many potential buyers as possible? To be generally appealing aim for to create a balance between enough of a blank palette for their personality to be injected into easily versus a bland and unappealing interior.

Lighting is a major factor with your sight, especially natural light. When you walk from room to room ensure that you make the best use of natural light by opening all of the curtains and blinds (unless you are disguising an unattractive exterior) allowing light to flood into every room. Perhaps even remove some of your window dressings and replace with sheer natural fabrics to allow more light into your interior. Humans react differently to natural and artificial light. It is far more beneficial for our health and well being to be exposed to as much natural light as possible during the day.

Your nose and sense of smell
First impressions count, bad smells can be more overpowering and offending than bad aesthetics. Think about these elements which can cause bad smells; unventilated musty rooms, rubbish, pets, body odour, dirty clothes, tobacco smoke, mould, mildew and damp. The psychological associations with any of these smells will deter potential buyers immediately. Focus on airing each room for a good few hours the day before a house viewing, keep windows open (even if only minimal) to create through draughts and natural ventilation.

Create inviting smells around your home, from freshly baked cookies or freshly brewed coffee in the kitchen to freshly cut lemons/limes in the utility room and flowers in the bedrooms. Incorporating our food senses really trigger strong psychological associations – all highly pleasurable and stimulating, especially with freshly baked bread, cakes and spices like vanilla and cinnamon. Avoid clinical smells like bleach and cleaning fluid as well as any heavy smells.

From an eco perspective, avoid synthetic materials and products which give off that ‘fresh plastic smell’, a red flag for VOCs content. Personally one of my pet hates has to be air fresheners; potpourri, sprays, gels and especially plug ins. Using electricity and non renewable natural resources to fuel an indoor air freshener is ludicrous to me. Avoid these at all costs as there are ‘air friendlier’ natural alternatives to these chemical products.

Burning candles can add both stimulating kinetic light and be pleasing to smell – use natural beeswax candles which do not contain any synthetic ingredients, have zero VOCs and last a lot longer too. Just to note that burning any material whether natural or not creates emissions which although minimal in the example of candles, does add up.

Home improvement decorating ideas - Your skin, sensory feelings and touch
When you walk around your home touch the surfaces and feel what areas are pleasurable. Also check the condition and cleanliness of all surfaces for wear and tear, anything that lowers the tactile experience. The potential house buyer could and probably will touch everything as they view the house – door knobs, handles, flat surfaces, soft furnishings, textured finishes etc. Is your home creating the right impression and are the surfaces begging to be touched? Sofas and beds should have natural fabric linen, cushions, pillows, throws and furnishings to create a cosy feel and add a finishing tactile touch.

Your ears, hearing, sound and noise
What can you hear in and around your home, what sounds are pleasurable to your living experience? You may be used to the next door neighbour’s dog barking, the sound of the 5pm train to London Waterloo rattling past or engine noise from the rush hour traffic. Potential buyers won’t! Either enhance what you can with soft ambient music playing in the background, close windows which face sources of noise pollution and open windows which overlook areas of nature so that you can hear the birds and wind in the trees. Alternatively consider the time your house will be viewed for the best noise control.

Your emotions and feelings
Emotional reactions are quite a wide field, as yours will differ from the next persons. You have created, tweaked and polished your home based on your lifestyle, so it is personal to you. Décor is the best example of one man’s riches being another man’s rags – plaid versus tweed, carpet versus tiles and wallpaper versus paint. Is the décor tasteful or tacky? Is the condition clean or dirty? When selling your home, try to remain as neutral as possible in the redesign to appeal to the masses rather than the individual. Above all a clean home promotes the best image.

And finally......
I hope you enjoyed reading this selling your home advice article, the last in the series.

The free resources on my website will help you make informed choices about eco interior design and home renovations. That is really what green design centres around – informed choices. These choices will positively or negatively affect your health, wellbeing and the natural environment. In fact it is not only you that is affected by your actions, it is those around you, future generations and the living species who share our world.

View Part 1 of the selling your home advice guide here....


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