Pet ownership doesn’t have to mean resale disaster when you put your home on the market. You can love your furry, finned or feathered friends and still banish all evidence of their presence before your first open house.
Check For And Remove Fleas And Other Pests
If there are fleas in your house, you probably know it. Fleas are common in certain areas of the country where owning a pet is almost an open invitation for these pests to cross your threshold and make themselves at home.
Once installed, they’re bad news. Indoor fleas live on blood they extract from pets and hapless nearby humans. One female flea can consume 15 times her weight in blood every day, and will produce nearly 2,000 eggs. Fleas bite, carry disease and are very unpleasant to have around. Make arrangements to have your home fumigated to eliminate flea populations hiding in your carpet, drapes and bedding. Don’t entertain the notion of waiting them out. Fleas can go months without feeding and come back stronger than ever.
Shampoo The Carpets
You can love your furry pets or you can love your carpet, but it’s hard to have equal affection for both. Where pets play, pet hair and dander are sure to fly, and your carpets are ground zero for both. Pet dander triggers powerful, debilitating allergies in some people, so even when odor isn’t a problem, thoroughly vacuuming carpeting is an essential chore when cleaning up after a pet.
If that pet has had an “accident” on the carpet, remediation is important, too. Not to dwell on the unpleasant, but pet vomit and urine both contain enzymes that can be difficult to eradicate completely. In the case of urine especially, the liquid dries into a crystalline form deep in carpet. During dry weather it can be odorless, but when it gets humid, or the carpet becomes moist after a shampoo, the crystals reactivate and begin to smell again.
There are new enzyme based carpet shampoos on the market designed especially to eliminate pet odors. They break the chemical bonds in organic matter like urine and stop odor for good. Professional carpet cleaners also offer special enzyme treatment for households with pets, but there may be an extra charge.
Have Your HVAC Ducts And Filter Cleaned
You’ve seen those Peanuts cartoons featuring Pig-Pen wandering around in his own private cloud of dust. A pet shedding hair also produces a little cloud of large and small hairs and dead skin floating around until they land or are sucked into the HVAC ductwork.
Over time, ducts gets dusty and dirty anyway, but the addition of pet hair worsens the problem and can lead to a re-release of hair on occasion. The only way to eliminate the threat is to have your ducts professionally cleaned and your HVAC filter replaced. The filter replacement you can perform yourself, but the duct cleaning will likely require the services of a professional.
Repaint
You may not need to repaint your whole home, but even a well-behaved pet can cause damage to baseboards, window ledges and walls. Take the time to inspect your home with pet remediation in mind. Pay particular attention to the areas where your pet liked to play, eat and sleep. You might also have to spackle a few gouges and fill some small scratches.
Repair Floors
Most pets love scrambling across your hardwood floor, slipping and sliding while playing fetch. A few minor scratches might just require a touch up with a scratch removal kit that includes wood filler and finish. If there’s a lot of damage, though, you may need to consider refinishing the floor or installing floor covering.
Check The Doors
Doors often display telltale signs of pet activity. It could be something as obvious as the presence of a “doggie door,” or metal scratch plate, or more subtle marks like tiny gouges. It’s usually considered a good idea to restore doors to pre-pet condition whenever possible. The one exception is the case of a new owner with a pet preferring an existing doggie door, but that’s a limited pool of potential candidates. Installing a new door assembly can be tricky, but it’s also a good time to enhance your home’s security with the purchase of a new locking system.
Banish Odors
If you allowed your pet on the furniture, there’s a chance pet odors still linger that you’ve grown so accustomed to you can’t really smell them anymore. Just to be thorough, have your furniture and drapes cleaned if they will be in the home while you’re pursuing a buyer. If you want to take a DIY approach, there are deodorizing products on the market designed to treat furniture and drapes. Oh, and this is also a good time to eliminate any lingering pet hair and dander from fabric fibers. An intense vacuuming session will also give you a chance to use all those strange attachments on your vacuum cleaner.
Restore The Lawn
Your pet’s influence may extend beyond the house to the surrounding landscape. Although there may be lingering evidence of scratching activity on trees, the most visible signs of canine habitation especially are dead spots in the lawn. According to the folks at Weed Pro, the first step in repairing dog damage to a lawn is to carefully remove the dead grass and water the spot to eliminate residual urine. Add compost to the area and reseed it, covering the seed with soil. The last step is to keep the seed uniformly moist until it sprouts and becomes established.
Remove Other Signs Of Pet Occupation
If you haven’t already, now is the time to remove some of the more obvious signs of pet occupancy. This includes items like the:
- Doghouse
- Kennel
- Scratching posts
- Toys
- Bathing gear
- Leashes/chain
If yours was one of the 43 million households in the U.S. with a beloved dog, or one of the 36 million households with a cherished cat, these measures may seem extreme or silly. One of the goals of preparing a home for sale is to make it as generically appealing as possible, though. That includes making it more attractive to the 38 percent of U.S. families that do not have pets.
