One of the often overlooked rooms when staging your home for sale is the laundry room.  Most homeowners, even those who know that the home must be decluttered, neat and clean when their home is on the market, often forget about carrying this into the laundry room.

And those homeowners who don’t have a laundry “room”, but instead have their washer and dryer in the basement, fail to market this space in an attractive way.

The laundry room, whether or not it’s an actual room, a closet, or an area in the basement, needs to be shown to its fullest potential.

That means that the homeowner needs to show the buyer that there is adequate room for storing laundry detergents, etc. and for perhaps other functions, such as folding clothes and ironing.

Here’s a list of things you can do when staging your laundry “room”:

• At the very least, there should be shelving above the machines where the laundry detergent, bleach, fabric softener, dryer sheets, etc. should be neatly lined up.  I like putting these items in storage baskets for a neater appearance.
• The tops and sides of the washer and dryer should be clean.  Wipe up any spilled detergents.  Also, if you are selling the machines along with your home, make sure you clean the underside of the washing machine lid and around the basket, as buyers will lift it up to look inside.  The lint should be removed from the dryer lint screen.
• While a fresh coat of paint on the walls is highly recommended, at least wipe off scuff marks and dirt with Mr. Clean Magic Sponge.
• Especially when showing the home, there should be no clean or dirty laundry visible in the laundry room.  Dirty laundry should be in the washing machine if not enough time to wash and dry, and clean laundry should be put away.
• Sometimes laundry rooms are used as another junk or storage room in the house.  This implies to the buyer that there is not enough storage in the home.  Try removing anything unrelated to the purpose of doing laundry.  If you can’t, make sure the items are neatly and attractively stowed away.
• Home sellers who have a washer and dryer in the basement often overlook the fact that this area needs to be staged.  Don’t let buyers think that the home is missing a laundry room.  Make sure the area around the machines is sparkling clean to get rid of the “yuk” factor, especially in unfinished basements. Set up an ironing board and iron to show that this area is a laundry “room”.
• If you are lucky enough to have a table or countertop to fold laundry, make sure this surface is free of any items.
• If there is enough room in the laundry room, set up an ironing board and iron to show that there is adequate room to do so.
• If the machines are in a closet without doors, an inexpensive way to hide them is to install a tension rod with drapery panels or even a tension shower rod and shower curtain.

Here’s an example of the before and after of a laundry room we staged:

In this situation, the laundry closet held not only laundry detergent and related items, but also a lot of cleaning supplies and was very unsightly.  We bought uniform, inexpensive, fabric-lined baskets to store these items.  We also found these two laundry hampers in the pool house where they were going unused.  We removed the table and clothing rack as these were taking up too much space in the room. 

The result was a clean and organized laundry room where a buyer might actually not mind doing laundry.

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Tags: home selling tips, home staging, staging a laundry room

This entry was posted on April 29, 2010 at 11:26 am and is filed under home selling, home staging, real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.