Preparing your home for sale continued...

To continue our discussion of how to prepare the outside of your home for sale, branches of bushes and trees that touch the siding or hang over the roof of the house need to be trimmed back. Home inspectors will write them up has a maintenance item and the leaves or needles will clog gutters and downspouts causing more inspector write ups. As long as we are talking about shrubs and trees, you should trim them back to open up the areas around windows and sidewalks to let in more light and to keep walkways clear. I showed a really nice house recently where the shrubs in the front of the house were so overgrown that we could hardly walk past them to get into the house. Besides having to brush up against the wet bush, it made the front porch look like it was part of a jungle and very dark. Another problem that is easy and cheap to fix is to look for wood siding or decking touching the dirt. All you need to do is push the dirt away and clean off the wood. The home inspectors really watch for that 'earth contact' as it causes rot in the wood and real expensive damage if not corrected. The last item is the moss on the roof. This is sometimes more than the average homeowner can handle, but with a little moss killer sprinkled on the ridges of the roof, most of the moss will die off and blow or wash away in the weather after a month or so. Moss will distroy a roof and all inspectors will write it up as a repair item. Most of these fixes are very expensive to fix and most homeowners can do the work themselves for little or no money. Next time we will start on the interior of your home to get it ready for sale. d