Did you replace your original, dated, marginally functional appliances to get your house ready to sell?

This goes a long way toward staving off “low-ball” offers by bringing your home up to some semblance of current style and desirability.

If you have made this choice, do you then choose to leave on all the protective wrapping, performance statistics stickers and warranty registration information? Or do you remove all of these?

This may seem like a silly question, but it is a choice that you will need to make if you find yourself in this position.

Usually, in the case of a flip, the flipper/seller will leave all the packaging and protective wrap on the range, cooktop, stove hood, dish washer, refrigerator and microwave since no one will be using them until the successful buyers move in. That newness adds to the attraction of buying a remodeled home and having the joyous experience of unwrapping and setting the appliances up for their very first use.

However, in the case of a house you’re still living in, this may prove problematic.

If you plan to cook in your house while it is on the market and during the escrow period, you might want to remove all the packing and appliance wrapping, lest you cause a fire hazard or in some way impede the proper use of the device(s).

You might be OK to leave the blue film on the refrigerator shelves, but consider removing the safety tape from the egg tray. It might prevent you from storing all your eggs.

In addition, if you still have those hard to find, and even harder to remove, strips of painters’ tape under the cabinets and baseboards, left by the painters in their clean-up process, you might want to pick up an X-Acto knife or some other tool to peel off these artifacts.

And if the marks lining up the positioning of the faucets on your quartz counters are still visible, try a cleanser or one of those magic eraser sponges to try to remove the marks.

If you notice some dark spots on the edges of your sparkling bright white quartz island, you might want to use the same cleanser and eraser sponge to remove the remnants of the glue the installers used to properly measure, cut and install your new counters.

Leslie Sargent Eskildsen is an agent with RealtyOne Group West and a member of the California Association of Realtors’ board of directors.  She can be reached at 949-678-3373 or [email protected].

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