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Market Ready Westchester Share www.maryannhl.com

By
Real Estate Sales Representative with Houlihan Lawrence

Q. I plan to reduce the clutter in my home by putting everything in the closet. Do I need to worry about what buyers will think of my overstuffed closets?

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A.In a word: Yes. “Cleaning the house by stuffing closets is like throwing money away,” said Michael Druckman, a real estate agent with Stribling & Associates in Manhattan. In some cases, he added, “an overstuffed closet can truly kill a sale.”

Closets should be considered among the most important rooms in a home, Mr. Druckman said, especially in cities like New York, where storage space is a common concern. “Buyers want to know that they can live comfortably in the apartment and that all their belongings can fit,” he said. “Even if the closets are large, clutter makes them look smaller and gives the illusion of less space than is really available.”

And people often stuff their closets with things they don’t need anyway. “I’ve seen closets of 40- and 50-year-olds filled with T-shirts from the fifth grade and lacrosse sticks from prep school,” he said. Cleaning them out is worth the effort, he said, because the more organized you look, the more your buyer will view the home as taken care of.

Sharon Lowenheim, a professional organizer and owner of Organizing Goddess in New York, agreed. “If you’re planning on moving, that’s a great opportunity to revisit everything you own,” she said. “You don’t want to pay movers to move stuff you never use from one place to another,” especially when there’s a good chance it will become a storage problem at your new home.

Too many people are overly nostalgic, she said, and “have a tendency just to drag along everything they’ve ever owned.” A better approach, she suggested, would be to ask this: “What these items are doing to contribute to the life you’re living now and the life you plan to be living from this point forward.”

Things you don’t really need can be sold on eBay or through consignment shops, donated to charity or thrown away.

If there are some things you can’t bring yourself to get rid of, you may be able to find extra storage space by better organizing everything in your closets — an exercise that may pay off. “If you can put clutter away in the closet in a way that’s orderly,” Ms. Lowenheim said, “it helps to illustrate just how great the closet space is.”

One option is to use tidy stacking plastic drawers from a retailer like the Container Store, if there’s enough room in your closet. “I’m a firm believer that everything you own should be accessible,” she said.

Plastic boxes are fine, but don’t even consider plastic bags.

“If you’re talking about putting things in plastic bags and just piling them up,” she said, “that’s going to make your closet look crowded. People are going to think, ‘Oh, I don’t want this apartment.’ ”

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Questions about repairs or redecorating before putting a home on the market may be sent to marketready@nytimes.com. Unpublished questions cannot be answered individually

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