Here's Ten Tips for preparing your home for showings. Many of them seem like common sense, but they're all very important to ensuring a Top Dollar Sale. This is especially true if you plan to preview your home on the web.

• The way you live in a house and the way you sell a house are two different things. You're not trying to portray a "home family atmosphere", your trying to create a showplace.
• Everything off the Kitchen counters that isn't VITAL to daily existence. That means the Canister set from your grandmother, the cookie jars, the bread maker, the cookbooks, the pile of envelopes. You're moving anyway, now is a good time to start packing. The coffee pot and toaster can stay.
• Old green and gold carpets? Hardwood underneath? Rip it out! That's right, pay someone to rip out the rug and polish the hardwood. Do NOT give the buyer a credit towards doing it. Do It! The old adage is, "The Buyer only knows what they see, not the way you say its going to be"
• Remove excess furniture. Take the leaf out of the dining room table, put the extra two chairs downstairs in the basement. Nix two of the coffee tables, a bureau or 2, and anything else you can get away with. We're looking for open and airy.
• Take everything off the refrigerator door, and the top of the fridge too. It should look like a refrigerator, not an art gallery like in "normal peoples homes." Remember, think showpiece.
• Take down almost all of the family pictures. You don't want people staring at pictures of your kids. Especially if they're a young single couple who is not yet in child-mode. One or two is fine, but not the gallery of historic family photos lining the staircase.
• Paint the Front Door and Trim around it, and perhaps the front foyer as well. It makes a great impression and the Buyers love the smell of new paint. Makes them feel like the home has been renovated.
• Energy Savings go out the Window. Can all of those 60 watt bulbs and put in the 100 watt ones. If needed, go through the house and take down any of the little outdated light fixtures. Twenty dollars at Home Depot can buy you a cute new brass one which you can put up in no time.
• Get three tubes of caulk and use them all up until they're gone. When in doubt caulk. As a famous lousy carpenter says, there's nothing a good caulking won't fix. Caulk around the bathtubs, caulk where the kitchen and bath counters meet the wall, caulk the door and window moldings throughout at the corners.
• Go out and buy one of those cute little potpourri cookers and get some of that pretty Christmas stuff to cook. People will remember that YOUR house was the one that smelled like a Christmas tree. Very distinctive on a day when they may have seen 10 homes or more.