want to move soonish, cannot do it now, what to do to be ready when the time is right?

[bebemoojem]

How do/what should you do to prepare your home so that's it's saleable?
If you're not thinking you can move for a good year can you/should you get your house appraised to see value? Or will you then be dealing to tons of unsolicited mailings from agents wanting to 'help?'

Can anyone give me a quick walk through of what I should be doing to be ready so that if we see the right house/set up/ suddenly win the lottery that we can put our house on sale and be more likely to sell?

Declutter. Wash walls. Get a blunt honest friend, ideally who has done a lot of house hunting, to look round a tell you what catches their eye. Look on Rightmove for other houses that are similar in your area and compare your house to those

Then take pictures, and let MN critique

Do all of the small jobs you've been meaning to do for ages - for us this was get a new doormat, tidy up the ivy at the back, buy the storage boxes you've needed for the shelves, that kind of thing.

Not only will this get you ready, but it will also give you a whole heap of pleasure now - we came out of the process wishing we'd done it three years before rather than when we were just about to leave .

Declutter, freshly painted walls, maintain your garden and tidy it up a bit. Seriously deep cleaning will help, the carpets and ceilings and behind corners and sofas.

You could have a look at comparable property in the area and pick out the ones you find most appealingly and where you would want to live. What do you like about them? How can you make your house better than them? I don't think it's about throwing money at it, but ultimately when it comes to selling you want your house to be the best one of its kind on the market.

We have a vague idea about the other houses because it's all 5yo houses, unfortunately the houses that have sold recently are all repo.s so they don't compare exactly.
Everyone who originally had had signs up pretty much took them down and then there was a rash of people doing garage conversions...not sure if that means that they were having so little interest or that no one was willing to buy at the prices their non-repo houses were listed at.... .

I've been decluttering and trying to look at making the whole house look 'fresh' again by doing some painting. Dh says that the bathrooms ought to be completely tiled, but I said that even if the bathrooms were freshly painted they might attract a buy with their potential as they're not that old really.

You live on a new build estate? Are there any newer estates that have been built in your area since your own?

there are some in a town a ways away (where we actually looked this weekend for a place) and prices were comparable to what we bought at (but probably unfortunately not what we're likely to get for the house) and then there was an 'upgrade' estate (overall bigger houses) on the other side of the city... our estate is the last one that can be built in this part of the city because of space (they'd have to re-zone farmland over the motorway to grow the city out any further in this direction)

In a 5 year old house, in estates full of similar houses, you need to make your house stand out in peoples minds. The great thing is that you can do that with things that you can take with you - rugs, pictures, bedding, towels, cushions. Get on some interiors blogs for ideas, then buy at Ponden Mills/other cheap places.

Plant big containers in the garden, with bright flowers, and a nice seating thing so it looks like a fun family space, not the drab square of grass in most new builds.

It'll make it a nicer house while you live in it too ! Unless your bathroom is manky, don't worry about it. Just make sure it is fresh, bright, and really clean.

the make your house stand out fills me with hope as we've got off street parking spaces, granite worktops, wood flooring and borders in the garden. All of which make our house different :)

I'll look into the interior design/soft furnishings :)

The bathroom is not manky of course. I think they just need a bright coat of paint as they're still the thin white paint the builders splashed on the walls.