Make Sure Your Home Has Good Common Scents

When you are selling your home you have only a short period of time to make a good impression on a buyer. That good impression can be catastrophically ruined by unpleasant odours. But you are likely used to those smells so you won’t notice them at all.  

Scent is the sense that is most heavily linked to memory and recollection.  That’s why the smell of certain spices can have you looking around the room for your grandmother, or perfume can make you ache for a loved one who is far away.

Lisa Salt is the top selling agent selling Vernon real estate.  She has some proven successful suggestions on how to make your property smell nice when potential buyers are viewing. That way, their immediate impressions of the property and the memories they leave with are more likely to be positive.

Get a Second Opinion

But smells are invisible so it’s easy to forget them in the hubbub of staging your house for presentation. You can bet that the way your house smells will affect how a buyer remembers the property.  After the showing when they are considering putting in an offer they will be relying on their memories of the home. If those memories are tainted by the lingering impression of a bad odour, they are unlikely to want to buy. What can be done about these pesky and less-than-pleasant perfumes?

First, figure out how your house really smells. As previously mentioned, it’s hard to do this yourself, so ask a friend who hasn’t visited for a while let you know if there’s a scent you need to cover up. Better yet, you can ask your real estate agent if they think your home could use some freshening up.  They’ll be happy to give you an objective, professional opinion that will help your home sell.

Finding The Culprits

Second, identify the places that odours hide. The big culprits here are usually fabrics, but scents can be found almost everywhere. As a result, washing bedding, towels, clothes, carpets and upholstery can be a good start to making your house smell perfectly fresh.

Upholstery and other textiles that can’t go in the washing machine can be hard to clean thoroughly, but they have an impressive ability to soak up the everyday odours of your house. A great option for dealing with this is using baking soda or a baking soda based refreshing powder. All you need to do is spread the powder on the fabric, let it set, and vacuum it off. Once your furniture is smelling fresh, you can start to work on the atmosphere.

If washing  or baking powder doesn’t quite do the trick, or if a fabric is difficult to wash thoroughly, you can also treat it with a fabric refresher like Febreze. The important ingredient is fabric refreshers like these is called beta-cyclodextrin, which is what lets them eliminate odors instead of just masking them with perfumes, so make sure that you are using a product that contains it.

The Usual Suspects

Pets are a common cause of odours. Even when you don’t take the hair they lose into account, or if you have a non-shedding dog, they still produce lots of dander that gets ground into every accommodating surface. To get rid of pet odours, try products that are listed as containing enzymes.

Enzymatic products reduce pet stains and odours very effectively, so much so that when you use them properly not even your pet can smell anything afterwards. Sometimes enzymatic cleaners do have a slightly musty scent of their own, though, so it’s a good idea to follow them up with a spritz of refresher. Many vets and pet stores even sell enzymatic candles that are great for giving the whole house a fresh scent.

Candles Can Be Illuminating

Candles are a common choice of room refresher, and with good reason. Candles tend to last a long time, they are fun to burn, they create a lovely ambiance, they come in a truly massive variety of scents, and they are affordable. Candles make a particularly good decoration in bathrooms, where they can lend an air of serenity and relaxation.

If the idea of an open flame concerns you (candles should never be left unsupervised while lit) then you may want to consider a wax melter. This is a simple electrical device that plugs in and uses lower levels of heat to melt wax cubes made for that purpose. This gives you the advantages of a candle without having to worry about an open flame.

Natural Scents are Best

If you don’t like using candles and chemicals to freshen your house, there are more natural options. Fresh flowers are great for staging a home and making it smell great. Baking prior to a showing can fill your house with a warm and inviting smell. Essential oils can also be used to ad some zest to the air.

Reed diffusers are also a great way to freshen a room. These work when a handful of small reeds is allowed to sit in a container of essential oils. The reeds absorb the oils and diffuse the scents throughout a room. Not only are reed diffusers quite effective, but they require little maintenance. If you are planning to use such a diffuser, be aware that it sometimes takes as much as a day before the scent is at full capacity. As a result, you should try and set them up well before your showings start. Reed diffusers are also a very aesthetically pleasing choice for a variety of rooms.

Some people find regular air fresheners overwhelming. They seem to create a cloud of chemical perfume that fills a room and chokes everyone inside it. In general, this is not the desired effect. However, when selling your home you want to take control of all the potential buyers’ senses, including their sense of smell. This means keeping your home smelling fresh. Air fresheners are not always the best option.  However, they are good in a pinch.

Clean and Fresh

Which scents should you use once you’ve decided how you will go about it? Ultimately, the choice is yours, as there is no specific scent that guarantees good sale. That said, try and fine clean scents that smell fresh.  They will complement your home and leave a positive impression.

I hope this advice helps you prepare to show your home!