How to Stage your Closets for Maximum Buyer Appeal

Guest Blogger #371, Entry #959, February 15, 2012

Potential buyers love to open doors and look in cabinets when viewing a house.  What will they see when they look in your closets?  Open your closet doors and take a fresh unbiased look at them.  Consider what you might say if you were viewing your closets for the first time.  Would you think “this is a great closet”, or would you think “there’s no way this will work for me”.  If your closets won’t wow your potential buyer, there some simple inexpensive ways to make your closets much more appealing and hopefully help you sell your house.

Stage your closet to look attractive and functional

Image via: House to Home

Purge and Organize

Whatever the size of your closet, it is probably a bit overcrowded and perhaps disorganized.  The simplest method of improving any closet for potential buyers is to purge and organize.  If your closet looks packed and there is no space to put one more item, it will give potential buyers the feeling that the closets in your home are too small.  If you organize the closet and pull excess items out so that there is plenty of room, it will make the closet immediately seem roomier and feel larger.  A potential buyer will get the feel that there is plenty of room for their things.

Make sure that everything on the shelves is organized, folded and neat.  If you have smaller items, place them in plastic bins and stack the bins up on the shelves instead of having items falling all over each other.  If you have an extensive shoe collection that is overpowering your closet, consider boxing some of them up now so that they do not take up all the floor space.  Consider adding shoe bags that will hold many pairs of shoes and get them off the floor.  Shoe boxes that are neatly stacked on shelves or the floor are good as long as they are neat and organized.

Create a welcoming closet

Be sure to paint and clean the interior of the closet and if lighting is poor get some LED battery operated lights to brighten the space. Nothing is worse than a dark, dingy closet.  Be sure to add an air freshener to your closet to kill any unpleasant odors that might linger.  If you tend to keep laundry in the closet, move everything to the laundry room while you are trying to sell your home.  No one likes to look at other people’s dirty laundry.

Do you have sliding doors that don’t slide or come off their track?  Nothing turns off a potential buyer more that this. It’s definitely worth making the small investment to replace them. It will make a huge impact to potential buyers.

Don’t forget the kid’s closets when staging your home

Image via: iheart Organizing

Install a closet organizer

And ultimately if you want to really help your house sell consider adding that closet organizer you just never got around to installing.  You may not be able to enjoy it long but it may just be that added incentive to your potential buyer to select your house over the one down the street.  There are never more wows that are heard when a potential candidate opens a closet door and sees a beautiful organized closet.  It is always a first on the list of plusses for any potential home buyer.

Jill Zarin’s closet has buyer appeal with display and storage

Image courtesy of Closet Factory

Kay Wade is Vice President of Design with Closet Factory’s corporate headquarters for over 15 years, Kay Wade has developed new, exciting and innovative product lines including custom closets, home office, media rooms, laundry and even a new custom garage collection.

For more closet ideas on Stagetecture, click here.