Selling your home can be a disruptive time for you and your family. Keeping the house clean and picked up can be a challenge especially if you have young children. Vacating your house on nights and weekends for showing can be trying as well. If you want to minimize these inconveniences by selling your house faster, you may need to do a bit of prep work before you put your house on the market.

Try looking around your house with unbiased eyes. Do you see a bunch of clutter? What about all those mementos that are on the bookshelf? Sure, they mean a lot to you, but to your prospective buyers they could just look like clutter and make the house less appealing.

Some things you should look to do before your first showing include, reducing clutter on shelves and counters, thinning out your closet so it appears bigger, removing some furniture if your rooms have too much (this will make the rooms seem bigger) and storing away anything that is not needed on a daily basis. Getting rid of this extra stuff will also help you when it comes time to move!

But what if you still want your clutter after the house is sold, what do you do with it in the mean time?

One great way to get your extra stuff out of the house, and still keep it is to store rent a storage unit and store it away. Renting mini storage is easy and affordable, and you can even get climate controlled storage for your more valuable pieces. If you plan properly and pack your stuff well, you can simply zip over to the storage unit on moving day and grab the boxes for your new home.

Rental storage units come in many sizes and picking one that is just right for your needs is key to having enough room without wasting money on space you wont fill.

If you have just a couple of boxes that you want to get out of the way, you might want to consider a 5 X 5 rental storage space. This is about the size of a large closet so you could fit several boxes and even a small piece of furniture.

If you are clearing out a couple of rooms, look at a 10 X 15 storage rental unit. This will hold about 2 rooms worth of stuff and some extra boxes or small furniture. Depending on how tightly you pack the unit you may be able to fit a whole apartment or very small house.

If you have a cellar stuffed full of Grandmas old household goodies that you cant bear to part with, clear the whole thing out and rent a 10 X 20 storage space. Getting rid of clutter like this will go a long way to a speedy and profitable home sale.