Apr 5, 2016 By Harry Funk 3 min read

Say you’re contemplating putting your home on the market. You might want to listen to Beth Agnoli.

“You’ll hear this from me many times: Less is more,” she told those in attendance at the March 31 “Preparing Your House for Sale on a Budget” program at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

Agnoli, of A&A Staging, joined Keller Williams Realtor Cindy Rack to provide plenty of helpful hints to what turned out to be a capacity crowd. And a recurring theme addressed less, as in clutter, and more, as in the amount of free space visible to potential buyers.

That should start as soon as they walk inside the home.

“Go in with a critical eye,” Agnoli recommended. “There should never be any shoes when you’re going to sell your house. You should limit the things, the clutter, inside your entranceway. You want people to think, oh, look how clean I can live here.”

And that also goes for the places that often end up with said clutter.

“You really want to pull everything out of all of your closets and put back so that it looks neat,” Agnoli said. “You don’t want people to think there’s not enough storage in this house … even if there isn’t enough storage in this house.”

Of course, there always is an alternative to storage.

“You have to pack everything up to move, anyway. So start to sort things,” Agnoli suggested. “Do a closet a week.”

And she provided a good rule of thumb for all those clothes that tend to take up space: “If you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it.”

Rack gave her own anti-clutter recommendation, the “15-minute rule,” which she came upon when she opened a cupboard and all of her Tupperware fell out. With resolution despite exasperation, she put the pieces and back and discovered that, within a relatively short time, everything was spick and span.

“I had been thinking, I’ve got to clean out my kitchen cabinets,” she said. “But I don’t have four hours on a Saturday to do that. When am I ever going to do that?”

Her solution: “Every morning, I can take 10 or 15 minutes and clean out another section of another cabinet. And so that’s what I did. By the end of the week, I had all my kitchen cabinets cleaned out. It just felt like such a load off me.”

Of course, that rule can apply all over the house, both inside and out, Rack said.

She and Agnoli showed several “before and after” slides, including a set that illustrated clutter on a larger-items scale.

“This was a downstairs game room,” Agnoli explained, referring to an overabundance of furniture, “and you couldn’t see the fireplace.”

The homeowners rectified the situation by figuring out what they didn’t need and hiring a company to take it far, far away. And so the fireplace was eminently visible in the “after” slide, helping to reinforce that key of house-selling insight:

“Less is more.”