There’s a lot you can do to get your home into shape so that it can command a niftier price tag once you decide to put it in the market. In the past, I was quite stingy about maintaining my house, not really appreciating my role as a homeowner. I used to think “why bother?”, I was too busy working on my career and spending long hours at work anyway — so I couldn’t find the motivation to do much for my poor house.

Then I got married and the thought of having kids somehow turned on my nesting instinct like nothing else could. ;) We decided to buy a newer house and put our older one on the market in 2001. Well, that was when I realized how far some tender loving care will go to help out your home’s price tag. We didn’t spend too much on giving it a little makeover — just a few touches, like you see in the sample images below (of someone else’s painted home, not ours).