What should I do to my house?

[hymen]

We have been casually looking for a little over a year for our second house. The house we live in now is great but we bought it 5 years ago with no kids and it not has two bedrooms. We put offers on two houses (one last summer and one last winter) but the first one we were outbid on and the second one the sellers decided to pull the house from the market. So I'm not trying to get my hopes up anymore, lol.

However, we are going to look at a house on Thursday that could be perfect. Right amount of square feet, perfect location, great layout, good lot size. I could see us possibly writing n offer this weekend. Our house is not listed yet but would need to sell in order to close on a new house. I am thinking I should maybe be preemptive and start doing some things to do this house in case we need to list quickly. I don't want to be over zealous, and our realtor will give us some staging tips when the time comes, but I would like to get a head start. At the very least, I figured I would get some things organized/cleaned.

Anyway, the list off the top of my head is:

Wash windows
Move all toys to downstairs play area (out of living room)
Clean basement laundry area
Weed out front
General cleaning

Any other ideas? I don't want to necessarily pack anything away yet in case this isn't the house for us.

[hymen]

Oh, and any tips to accomplish this with a two year-old and extreme pregnancy nausea are appreciated too!

[Deleted]

Declutter more than you think you need to.

Touch up paint in any areas that may be super noticeable.

Remove any extra furniture.

[Kristinmo]

We are under contract on our house. Here are the things we did:

1. Decluttered a lot. We put most of the kids toys in storage. All we kept was the bookshelf in their room and one 20 gallon plastic bin each that we put in the garage for showings. We put several pieces of furniture in storage as well.

2. Cleaned everything top to bottom. We actually hired a cleaning person to look for things that we miss since we typically clean the same way everytime.

3. Cleaned windows inside and out

4. Made minor fixes that a buyer would notice. Filled holes in the walls and touched up paint (we had it all painted a year ago but there were already imperfections).

5. Took down all personal pictures.