When your realtor suggests a home staging, you may agree to it without knowing what you need to do before prospective buyers arrive at your door. Here are seven commandments to follow so that your home is ready.

Trim Your Grass

Buyers will drive up to your home, so make sure that they have something beautiful to look at so that they start feeling good about your house right away. Take time to trim the grass and cut weeds. In fact, you might want to go further. You can add attractive flowers and bushes to make your home even more beautiful from the outside.

Clear Your House of Clutter

While you don't have to clear the house out entirely, it is in your best interest to clean the house better than it's ever been cleaned before. You may even want to contract a local maid service to spruce up your house so that new buyers don't think about how much they'll have to clean before they move their things in.

Put Your Things Away

Obviously you are still living in the house before you get a sale, but remember that those looking for a new home want to imagine themselves and their families in a new home. Therefore, for the house staging, make an attempt to remove artwork and other things in your home that are deeply personal. Your huge velvet portrait of Elvis might mean a lot to you, but it can hard for prospective buyers to get that vision out of their heads and start thinking about the space as their own.

Paint the Walls in Neutral Tones

While you may personally enjoy vibrant colors on the wall, keep in mind that others have different tastes than you do. The bright green paint in the kitchen might make you feel happy, but others may not have the same reaction. A design consultant with a masters in art education says neutral colored walls keep your staging efforts open to buyers, making it easier for them to project their own design ideas onto the home. A bold-colored wall only reminds buyers of your personal aesthetic, not what the property could be to them. Take the time before the home staging and repaint all the spaces in your home in neutral colors so that buyers can imagine their own colors.

Change Hardware

You might not be able to replace old cabinets or sinks, but you may be able to update things by replacing the faucets and other fixtures. New handles on the cabinets or new knobs in the bathroom can brighten up the rooms in your home.

Look at the Floors

It is easy to forget about the floors in your home, but possible buyers will not. Before you hold your home staging, go through your house and look at the floors in each room. Is the carpet in the living room stained and dirty-looking? Consider getting a professional carpet cleaner or replacing the carpet altogether.

Fix Things

One of the worst things you can do is to open your home to others knowing that there are a lot of things that have to be fixed. If you have broken screens and fixtures or holes and cracks in your walls, take steps to fix them before your home staging. If you don't, prospective buyers will be turned off and start calculating how much they'll spend fixing everything you did not. They might wonder what else needs to be repaired and whether there are more serious problems with the house that you aren't fixing either.

Use the information in this article to help you stage your home so well that you field multiple offers for your home. Enlist the help of your real estate agent to help you make your house look fantastic.