Choosing to sell a home is a very personal decision, often full of anticipation, nerves, stress, and lots of financial planning. Life changes come in a range of positive and negative categories – from babies born to new jobs – illness, divorce, and death also drive many home selling decisions. Many people who are buying and selling in the market today are doing so because life goes on! There are elections, recessions, and lives changed all around us. Many people are staying put – but some people have waited as long as they possibly could – and feel that now is the right time to put their home on the market.

It takes a stiff upper lip (or a stiff drink?) to walk around and be brutally honest with yourself about the condition of your home. Our perception of our homes are colored with so many things – memories of your first child, that paint color you finally perfected for the dining room, the dog curled up at the end of the sofa. Because your home is your haven, it’s so easy to put blinders on and live ‘around’ problems – like a stained carpet, leaking windows, creaking stairs, or a side door that’s weathered and splintering. We all tend to ignore items around the house in some fashion or another. The problem is – you can’t ignore anything when your home is going on the market.

The most important thing you can do to prepare yourself is to get in the right emotional state to deal with selling your home. Take a second to acknowledge how much your home meant to your life, and start the process of disconnecting from it as your primary residence. It’s a small thing, but when I’m working with a client at this point, we start to refer to the home as a ‘house’ – as in “we need to make repairs to the house” or “the side of the driveway by your house is cracked.” I believe it helps as we begin to build a list of updates we need to make to get a prospective buyer interested in purchasing the property.

When you’re listing your home for sale, someone should be able to wander through the rooms, admire the size and shape of your spaces, and begin to picture themselves living in your house. In many ways, this is also about fixing the things that you’ve let go in the course of every day life and need to be taken care of.

For more tips check out FrontDoor’s Home Selling Guide.

What’s one thing driving you nuts about your home this week?