Prepping a house for sale can bring many stresses. Unless you constantly work on repairing, updating, and decluttering your house, you may find yourself with a long list of projects. Some of the biggies, like updating paint, reducing clutter and depersonalizing your decor, are no-brainers. But, as you move through your house, cleaning out cabinets and closets, packing away your cherished trinkets, you come across little issues that should be addressed to help present your house in it’s most positive light.
As we prepare our house to be listed for sale, I will be sharing some of the projects we are working on, or have completed. One such project was refinishing our deck with Behr Deck Over and Behr Stain, which I shared in this post, Doing a Deck Over.
Today’s project was a much smaller one: cleaning the steel fire door between our garage and kitchen. We use the service door from our garage into our kitchen, personally, as our main entrance, so it gets a lot of use, and, over time, it has gotten a little grimy. It’s one of those things you look at every day, but don’t really notice how bad it is…until you notice how bad it is. So, it took a little elbow grease and about 30 minutes, but it looks much better and now should be easier to wipe clean on a regular basis.
Here are some before photos – I apologize for the blurry pics, I didn’t realize until I got them on my computer and it was too late to redo them.
I grabbed my “Mean Green” All purpose cleaner and a sponge with a scrubbie side, and went to work. I started at the top and sprayed in sections, and could see the cleaner cutting through some of the surface dirt.
Then I scrubbed with my sponge and made sure to wipe down with a clean, wet rag to remove any remaining residues.
If I had to go over really dirty areas, such as around the hinges and door knob, I would spray directly onto my sponge and then scrub. The door knob area was extra-filthy because we have been working outside a lot recently.
There is an area, in the center of the door, that I was unable to clean. We’ve had a large “Just Married” magnet there since we returned home from our wedding in Siesta Key…in 2012. As I scrubbed the magnet residue, the paint started to come off the door, and I DO NOT want to get into refinishing a steel door.
Here is the before, again, with a shot of the after. I think it looks better, don’t you?
Small tasks can make a big difference and can be welcome distraction from the big projects. Sometimes, it’s all about crossing items off my To-Do List.
