Our story.
My pre-sale expertise comes from two sides — both spent in the last few weeks before listing day.
On one side, I ran a successful residential cleaning business for years, with a specialty in pre-sale cleans. The call came two weeks before listing day. You had to turn a tired, lived-in home into something the photographer would actually want to shoot. Hundreds of homes. I watched what the well-styled ones did differently from the unstyled ones. Noticed which sold quickly and which lingered. Learned which corners buyers actually look at and which ones nobody touches.
On the other side, it's personal. My partner and I have bought, renovated, styled and sold four of our own homes over the years. Every one of them DIY. Same playbook, refined each time.
The home in these photos was one of those four. We had bought a tired, neglected place with good bones, on a street we loved. Over eighteen months we renovated it ourselves — late nights, weekends, dust in our hair, the usual. When it came time to list, the agent we had hired suggested a professional staging package. They typically cost $4,000 to $10,000 — and at the end of the campaign, every piece of furniture, every cushion, every artwork goes back to the styling company. After eighteen months making the home ours, the idea of filling it with someone else's furniture for the photos, only to send it all back, didn't sit right. We declined. We knew the home. We had watched plenty of others get prepped. We did it ourselves.
Styled with what we already had — and a handful of hire pieces.
That phone call from the agent stuck with me. Not because of his offer, but because it confirmed what I had already started to suspect: most homeowners have no idea how much they could lift the result of their sale by styling well, and they assume the only path to it is paying thousands to a professional stager.
There's a huge gap in the market. The people who really need this knowledge — first-home upgraders, downsizers, families selling to fund the next chapter — are the ones least likely to spend thousands on staging. They want to do it themselves. They just need someone to show them how.
That's what Sell It Styled is. Everything we figured out across four homes of our own, plus everything I learned cleaning hundreds of other people's homes for sale — distilled into one place. Room-by-room styling, what to hire and what to skip, the trick with photography day, the small fixes that make the biggest difference in listing photos, and a full chapter on the deep-clean and declutter plan that comes from years of pre-sale cleaning work. $49. Fully DIY. What you buy is yours to keep.
The heart of the home — open-plan living, kitchen, dining.
After four homes of our own and years of pre-sale cleaning work, I closed the cleaning business. Your Coastal Housekeeper became this — the guides, the checklists, the playbook.
If you're somewhere in the messy middle of preparing to sell — overwhelmed by where to start, unsure what's worth doing — I made Sell It Styled for you. Start with one of the free checklists below. They're the same ones we used.