Tag Archives: cats

What To Do About Cats and Litterboxes When Selling Your Home

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Cute but deadly

About 4 out of 10 people like pets, but not all of those pet lovers like cats. By keeping your cats in the house while trying to sell it, you are “turning off” well over half of your buyers.

Allergies are becoming more and more common. In some cases, allergies can be so extreme that the sufferer will be unable to tour your house, let alone consider buying it.

Also, you don’t know whether your pet will find some of the viewers extremely threatening and ‘freak out’ unexpectedly. The safest solution by far for you, your pets and the home buyers is to find friends or family who will temporarily adopt the cats until your house sells. Putting them in a good kennel is also a wise choice.

If you are determined to keep them in the house, then, to ensure that they do not get outside and are not bothered by viewers, you should put them in secure cages. You can locate the kennels in the basement, a mud room or the like.

If you refuse to cage them, then you must confine them to one of your less important rooms. Keep the door shut and put a sign up indicating the cats are inside. You could put up a picture of the inside of the room so people will feel less need to enter. If you do this, the litter box obviously has to be in there with them if you are out for any length of time.

I have seen litter boxes everywhere, but, the locations which really gross me out are anywhere near where food is stored, cooked or served. The least offensive place for the litter box would be in a basement a furnace room, utility room or laundry room. If none of those are a possibility, then it has to be a bathroom but please don’t make it the master ensuite or the guest powder room as those are important rooms for selling.

You should also do everything possible to make sure the litter does not smell. That might involve using a more expensive deodorizing litter and changing it daily whether it’s all ‘used’ or not. A deodorizer in the room would help with the immediate smell when the kitty is using the box.

In the Canadian Staging Training program, students are trained with how to broach the difficult topic of offensive smells in the home and given some practical suggestions as to home the smells can be removed. Christine Rae, founder of CSP, recommends an electronic air cleaner.

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In the Kingston, Ontario region, you can call upon Martha Stanton-Smith of Rearrangements Home Staging for all your home staging needs. Visit the Rearrangements website at http://rearrangements.ca. Be sure to download your free Special Report “Get Off The Home Selling Roller Coaster: 5 Reasons Houses Don’t Sell and What You Can Do About Them.”

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15 Ways NOT to Prep Your House for Selling

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I decided to have some fun today and list 15 unsuccessful ways I’ve seem people try to sell their houses.   Here goes:

1. Just throw up a sign, sit down in the living room and chain smoke in front of the big screen while you wait for offers.

2. Hire the realtor who lives on your brother-in-law’s street even though neither of you have ever met him or seen any of his signs in your neighbourhood.

3. Keep the cats’ litter in the kitchen and make sure to clean it only at the end of the week when it’s 100% clumped.

4. Assume the 60% of people who don’t own pets will appreciate your two large smelly bulldogs when they give their usual loud, aggressive and slobbery greeting.

5. Leave your all purple dining room all purple and assume everybody will still be eager to offer full asking price.

6. Assume people will find your house without being able to see the house numbers.  After all they can interpolate from the neighbours’ numbers.

7. Leave 3000 square feet of dusty rose carpeting intact assuming any new owners would rather replace it themselves than settle for your choice of neutral flooring.

8. Set the asking price at least 10% over any reasonable expectation so there will be lots of room for negotiations.

9. Use cheap hand me down furniture and paint-by-numbers art to stage and hope it will make buyers think you have an upscale home.

10. Don’t worry about any non-Catholics being offended by the huge portrait of the Pope in the hall because the reason you put it there is only because it has a nice antique frame.

11. Take your collection of 80 owl figurines and distribute them throughout the house so nobody will notice them and be distracted.

12. Forget about having any lamps in the living room because you don’t sit there anyway.

13. Leave 30 years accummulation of stuff right where it is in the house because people should be able to see past it and only look at the structure.  You’ll deal with it when you are ready to pack.

14. Books add ambience, so why would the stager think having at least 3 full bookshelves in each and every room make the place look like a public library?

15. Show evidence of as many activities as possible in a room so the space will look more useful, and therefore more valuable.

If you wonder why some of these ideas did not work, then by all means send me a question.

Oh, and here’s a bonus one.  16. Leave all the Christmas lights hanging from the eaves so the new owners will be grateful they won’t have to decorate come this Winter.