Here are a few suggestions to help you improve your home’s value when you’re thinking of selling, and save money while you’re doing it.

• Change out light bulbs in your home. Lighting makes a huge difference. If there is more light in your home, it appears to be bigger. Lighting can make a huge difference to a buyer. And changing a light bulb is a lot easier than trying to install an extra window.

• Change the light fixtures throughout your house. This is an easy way to update a house. Old light fixtures make a house look aged. By installing new light fixtures throughout your house, the whole place will look newer.

• Clean your house. Having a clean house, gives people the impression that the house is well cared for. Make sure to do deep cleaning. One of the most important things a lot of people don’t do is to clean their windows. By cleaning your windows, you will allow a lot more light into the home, and you will make the home worth a lot more.

• Paint your house. Most of the time, if you do the work yourself, you can paint the interior of your house for under $500. The best time to hire a painter is during the winter. There are a lot of exterior painters out of a job during the winter. They will be more than happy to come in and paint your house for you at a reduced rate.

• Put your junk and a lot of of your furniture in storage. This may sound like a big hassle, but it isn’t very expensive to do, and with most of your furniture gone and out of the way, the house will look bigger. The last thing you want to do is have a house that looks small and cluttered. By putting extra items and extra furniture in storage, you can really make the house look bigger.

• Make sure your kitchen and bathroom are spotless. This is one area of the home people like to have clean. That usually means you have to do some pretty deep cleaning. This means cleaning the things you don’t normally do like cleaning the oven, the fridge, and the tile grout.

• Make sure the lawn is looking its best. It doesn’t cost all that much to put fertilizer on your lawn and improve the way it looks. Also, for less than $40, you can usually rent a lawn aerator and aerate your lawn. When you aerate and fertilizer lawn at the same time, it can make a huge difference.

  Even small things like fertilizing, aerating, and mowing can do a lot to improve the overall beauty of your landscaping. According to a lot of real estate brokers, having nice landscaping can add as much as 15% to the value of your home when you go to sell it. Lawns that are beautiful and well maintained signify to the potential buyer that the house has also been well maintained. Curb appeal goes a long way. Even without walking through the front door, a buyer can usually tell what condition the house will be in based on the condition of the lawn.