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This cluttered basement will scare buyers away. The least expensive way to prepare a home for sale is to clean up.

You've heard it before. How we live is not how we sell. The reality is that our homes tell our stories. They are repositories for our "stuff," and they are billboards for our daily lives. At my house, I seem to always be "one behind" -- one load of laundry, one sink of dishes and one trip to the store to return the videos I once rented (in Beta). This is the type of routine deferred maintenance with which we all contend.

The routine "to-do" list is easily knocked out when it is time to prepare your home for sale. But before the yard sign goes up, most of us must also address a more costly variety of repairs. My own demons include a hallway that looks like it was painted by a sight-impaired monkey wearing oven mitts, and I will blame this one on a dog that can only navigate between rooms while dragging his lumbering, 90-pound, dirt-encrusted self along the walls. Then there is the carpeting that has been on life-support since the Reagan administration, the carpeting I vowed to replace as soon as the children were out of diapers and, failing that, out of college.

Don't Wait to Get Your Home in Shape

The fact is you have one chance to get it right when your home is offered for sale. The first wave of showings is critical, and once this buyer pool has been exhausted, you are relegated to the position of waiting for new buyers to enter the market -- or worse. You might find that you get a do-over by virtue of doing it all over again in a new, lower price range.

So how much should you spend on sprucing up your home in advance of your coming out party? That depends, and a knowledgeable local agent can help you evaluate the relative costs and benefits of improvements to make your home more desirable.

Your goal is not perfection; that simply isn't realistic for most of us on a budget. Rather, your goal is to do only those things which will produce a return that exceeds the investment. In other words, money "out" needs to exceed money "in." It's an agent's version of the value engineering concept.

As an example, I recently represented a couple in the sale of their investment property. What had once been their home, lovingly maintained and stylishly appointed, had over the years been converted to a rental property. And after a series of tenants, each packing their own unique varieties of domestic livestock and their own unique decorating tastes (the last one had apparently had an affinity for parakeets and purple), our little vacant offering clearly needed to be neutralized.

So what were our considerations? Well, at least three things had to be at the top of our preparation-for-sale hit list.

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