Making Your Home Move-In Ready—Even if You’re Not Moving (Part 1)
- nvilu7
- Apr 28
- 8 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Stop Designing for the Next Owner
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In 2022, while looking for a house, I started paying close attention to the boatloads of home renovation and design content available everywhere.
I saw a disturbing trend. Just about all that content was aimed at maximizing resale value. Homes designed for the hypothetical next buyer, not the homeowner.
Yikes, I thought. That's a problem.
Why?
Most people live in their homes for over a decade.
That's a long time to live in a space designed for someone else.
Thankfully, the home design pendulum is swinging back to individual expression in home design.
But I’ve talked to many homeowners that are still hesitant to make changes to reflect their personality because they think those changes could negatively affect resale value.
I’ve bought and sold four homes.
None of them were neutral.
Every one sold fast—at or above asking price.
Why?
Because they were move-in ready.
What Move-in Ready Means Today
Today’s buyers don’t want projects.
A Zillow analysis confirms it: buyers will pay more to avoid a fixer-upper—because renovations are expensive and stressful.
They want to buy homes where the big stuff—kitchen, bath, HVAC, roof, flooring—are done, where everything works, and where nothing has been neglected.
Today’s home buyer’s idea of “move-in-ready” is a home that’s:
Updated
In good repair
Well-organized
Note that “neutral” didn’t make the list.
The best part?
Designing a “move-in-ready” home makes it better for you to live in right now.
Here’s an example.
One morning, a colleague came into my office. She said, “Look at my shoes.”
I looked down.
She had on identical pumps—except that one was navy and one was black.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You have another pair like these at home.”
She growled.
My colleague kept her shoes in a pile on her closet floor. Her last act before leaving for work in the morning (usually 15 minutes late) was diving into her closet, grabbing two shoes, putting them on, and leaving for the day.
She said, “Now I have to walk around all day with these damn mismatched shoes, and I have five meetings.”
Every improvement you make in your home depends on seeing your house clearly.
But if your house is cluttered, that’s all you’ll see.
So, before you do anything else, get rid of the clutter.
First, Clear Out the Clutter
You’re not living your best life if your home is cluttered.
Clutter overloads the human brain. It makes it difficult to think clearly, to process information, and to complete tasks. The constant visual noise causes us to feel “stuck”—which makes it difficult to get rid of clutter (yes, totally unfair).
In some cases, clutter can be so overwhelming that it drives people to procrastinate…about everything.
If you have clutter in your home, you are not alone. In a 2024 survey conducted for The Container Store, half of Americans say that they have at least one room in their home that’s unsalvageable with clutter.
The average respondent to the survey said they wished they had three additional rooms in their home to store their stuff.
Whoa.
Dealing with clutter is the first step to making your home move-in ready. Before painting, decorating, buying furniture, or organizing, you need to remove the visual noise.
Get rid of the clutter so you can really see your space and turn it into what you love.
My Mom’s Closets
15 years after becoming an empty nester, my mom had filled every generous bedroom closet in her five-bedroom house with her clothing.
My dad asked for my help. He was never a clotheshorse, but had become alarmed as his already small allotment of closet space continued to shrink.
I told Dad that I was willing to help, but that he needed to keep his expectations small. I knew that trying to clear every closet in a day was asking Mom to make more decisions than she—and frankly, most people—could make. Would he be OK if I got him half a closet’s worth of space?
Yes, he would.
Mom and I agreed on this process:
Limit the exercise to the two closets in the master bedroom.
If Mom had worn the item in the last two years, it stayed.
If Mom hadn’t worn the item in the last two years, she needed to provide me with a realistic scenario for why she should keep it.
I would decide whether or not the scenario was realistic.
It turned out that Mom’s criteria for keeping an item was whether or not it fit her. Since she was the same height and weight for her entire adult life (super annoying), she had a lot of clothes that fit her body—but not her current life.
As we went through the items one by one, Mom saw how much stuff she didn’t use—and letting it go became easier and easier.
We were able to get Dad his half-closet in a couple of hours. Drunk with success, over the next few weekends we moved from closet to closet, identified the items Mom would actually use, and donated the rest. Mom ended up with a wardrobe of clothing in 1 ½ closets that she fully used and fully enjoyed.
“I kept all my favorites,” she told me. “And nothing I don’t use.”
Clutter Isn’t About Stuff
It’s about the emotions that are attached to that stuff.
Emotional attachment—getting rid of an item means losing a piece of your history
Fear that you might need the item some day
Guilt about throwing away a gift or something you paid for
Control—when having stuff equals security
In some cases, people have more stuff than they have space, or simply lack the mental or physical energy to put things away.
Reframe the Clutter-Removal Process
Whatever the scenario, the key to successful de-cluttering is to focus on the object and its current helpfulness to you—not how you feel about it.
You are not getting rid of stuff.
You are choosing to keep only the things that serve you right now.
Because clutter does such a number on your brain, don’t try to tackle it alone.
Get Someone to Help You De-Clutter
Your helper can be a friend, family member, colleague, or professional organizer. Whoever it is, they must be a clutter-hater and a systematic thinker.
Clutter-haters have one thing in common. Their stuff serves them, not the other way around.
Systematic thinkers include:
The co-worker who can find anything in seconds
The friend who always gets rid of an old piece of clothing when she buys something new
The sister who can pack for a two-week vacation in less than an hour, never overpacks, and never forgets anything
Yes, they are super-annoying. Yes, you need them.
How to De-Clutter in Five Steps
Here’s the process I used to help Mom de-clutter her closets and in many other subsequent de-cluttering projects.
1. Prepare a Small Area—and Your Attitude
Select the area you want to declutter. Keep the project small to keep from becoming overwhelmed. One room—or even one drawer, dresser, or bookcase—at a time.
Have three boxes ready—one for items you want to keep, one for items you can donate, and one for items to throw away. The “keep” box should be the smallest of the three.
Then, adjust your attitude prior to starting the project:
Focus on the object itself, not your feelings about the object
Be completely honest regarding the object’s usefulness to you
Avoid kicking yourself for acquiring and keeping the object
Resolve to move forward, not back
2. Clutter Q & A
One item at a time, out loud, tell your annoying clutter-hater accomplice:
What is It?
Describing the item helps you to look at the object objectively.
I’ve had clients describe an item, immediately realize that the item is not serving them and take it to the Donate or Throw Away bin—without me having to say a word.
I’ve also had clients fall down laughing because they have five identical extension cords in various clutter-piles.
How Did You Get It?
The answer to this question uncovers the emotional attachment you have to the item. If the object was a gift, it could be feelings about the giver; if it was a great deal, it could be the memory of the rush you got when getting a bargain.
Understanding the emotional attachment is the first step to detachment.
When Did You Get It?
Knowing how long you’ve had the item, and how long it’s been in a clutter-pile, unused and unloved, is unbelievably illuminating.
When Did You Last Use It?
Bottom line: if you haven’t used the item in over a year, or never used it, that object is not serving you and never will.
In what scenario would you keep it?
This is a very rare scenario, but sometimes an item that’s actually useful—like kitchen tools, office supplies, and home improvement tools—goes unused because it’s in a clutter-pile.
Pull it out of the pile and put it away where it can actually be useful.
Most of the time, though, the answer is “there is no scenario where I would keep this.”
3. Toss, Donate, or Keep
After each item Q & A, decide whether you are going to toss, donate, or keep the item and put it in the appropriate box. I have found that if the clutter-lover is honest about their items, at least half of the stuff in the clutter-pile will end up in the Donate or Toss box.
Take a photo of sentimental items before you let them go.
You keep the memory—without the clutter.
4. Clear Away the “Toss” and “Donate” Boxes ASAP
This is critical: get the “Toss” and “Donate” items out of your home immediately after the clutter-sorting exercise—before they become organized clutter.
Ask your clutter-hating friend to help you bag up the Toss items and take them to the dumpster or city dump.
Maybe he or she will accompany you to Goodwill, Salvation Army, or another deserving charity to contribute the Donate items on the way to a thank-you lunch, coffee, adult beverage, or dinner.
The sooner the items are gone, the less you’ll be tempted to revisit them and possibly create a new clutter pile.
5. Don’t Store Other People’s Stuff
I’ve known kind people who have temporarily stored items for friends or family. My parents stored my Christmas decorations in their unused attic for a few years until I moved into my current home. I stored some items temporarily for a friend moving from the U.S. to the U.K.
To protect your space, agree on a date when the items you’re storing will be removed. Be prepared to donate those items to a worthy cause (or simply toss them) if the stuff isn’t picked up on time.
In most cases, I’ve found that the person for whom you’re storing the stuff absolutely wants everything back as soon as possible. But I’ve also known people who hung onto a someone else’s stuff for years at the expense of their own storage space. Often, it’s parents who have kept all their kids’ childhood memorabilia, even after their kids are grown and moved.
So, parents—if you have your kids’ stuff stored in your home, consider packing it up and sending it to them so they can decide what to keep, what to donate, and what to toss.
What to Do After De-Cluttering
First, give yourself a hug. De-cluttering is HARD. It’s important to savor your accomplishment. Rejoice in that decluttered bookcase, drawer, closet, garage shelving, or toolkit. Use it as positive reinforcement. It will renew your momentum to move on to the next de-cluttering project.
Next, you need to figure out what to do with the items in your Keep pile.
I’ll cover that in the next post in this series.
Decluttering Essentials
Use these to make the process faster, cleaner, and way less frustrating.
Heavy-Duty Contractor Bags—for fast, no-excuses tossing
Label Maker—because “I’ll remember what’s in here” is a lie
Cordless Handheld Vacuum—clean as you go—momentum matters
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