Pre Sale Cleaning Booked to the Photo Shoot

A wide angle lens is not kind. It takes a whole room at once, it pulls in every window, and it flattens the light until the things your eye has learned to skip come back at full strength. Glass is the worst offender. A window that looks fine from four feet away photographs as a haze across the brightest part of the frame, and the sill underneath shows every mark on it. Light fixtures come next, because a camera looks up. Dust inside a glass shade, one bulb that does not match the other two, a ceiling fan carrying gray along the leading edge of each blade. Then the range, the inside of the microwave door, the front of the refrigerator and the whole run of counter. None of that is hidden. It is just what people stop seeing in a house they have lived in for years.

The front entry does the other half of the work. It is where a photo set starts and it is where forty people stand in a line on a Sunday afternoon, so the storm door glass, the door itself, the threshold, the fixture beside it and the first stretch of floor inside all carry far more weight than their square footage suggests. We work in the order the house will be seen: entry first, then the rooms getting photographed, then everything else. What we are not going to tell you is that a clean house sells faster or for more, because nobody honest can promise that. The true version is narrower and still worth buying. Presentation is the piece of a listing you control completely, photos stay up as long as the listing does, and a buyer in your kitchen is reading how the place has been kept.

What the visit covers

• Clean every window inside and out at ground and ladder height
• Wash the sills, the aprons and the sashes under each window
• Wash light fixtures, glass shades and ceiling fan blades
• Clean the range, the oven glass and the hood, front and under
• Wipe the refrigerator front, the handles and the door seals
• Wash the counters and the backsplash, then dry the fixtures
• Wash the front door, the threshold and the entry light
• Bring the bathroom up to photograph, mirrors and chrome last
• Vacuum and mop each floor, then vacuum the stair edges
• Sweep the front walk, the steps and the porch before the shoot

What we flag before the photos

Some of what a camera catches is not dirt. Porch paint peeling in sheets photographs as neglect, and washing it changes nothing. The same goes for a front step with mortar crumbling out of the joints, a run of trim gone gray and bare, or a ceiling holding the stain of a leak that got fixed years ago. Painting and masonry are in house here, so you get a number for that work while we are standing in front of it, plus a straight read on whether it fits before the listing goes live. Exterior paint and fresh mortar both need warmth, so from roughly December into March the honest answer is that the outside waits and we put the hours into what can be done indoors.

Agents usually call with a shoot date and a listing date, and that is all the schedule needs. Vacant houses are the simple version and often run on the empty unit list, since the cabinets and the appliances are open anyway. Occupied houses need a conversation about staging: what is being packed, what leaves before the photos, and which rooms are being shot. We would rather clean a room once it is cleared than clean around boxes that are going out on Friday. For a seller doing this without an agent, the same rule holds. Book close to the photos rather than close to the open house, because the photos are what most buyers meet first and, once the shoot is over, nobody goes back and reshoots them.