Selling and Decluttering – Newspapers

Posted on September 11, 2009 
Filed Under Listing and Selling Your Home, Valerie Zinger

 You may have been saving newspapers for future reading or craft projects or painting drop cloths but now your house is for sale.  While the stack of reading was okay when only you, your family and friends were in the house, now strangers will be touring through your home.  A stack of read or unread newspapers will not help your sale.  It will look like clutter and will also look unkempt.

If you have been saving newspaper for packing, I want to remind you that newsprint, that horrible black inky stuff, can rub off on the items you pack.  Splurge and buy some packing paper.  Okay, Mr./Ms. Environmentalist, keep some and use the clean packing paper closest to your item and the inked paper to ‘bubble wrap” or layer between the items. 

How should you approach that pile or piles of newspaper?  First, collect all the papers from around the house.  Anything that is over a week old should immediately go to recycling.  The one week of papers – review quickly and cut out any articles or coupons that you cannot live without.  The rest is added to your recycling pile. 

 If you really must have a few days of paper in the house (and in Ottawa, newspapers are collected every second week in the black recycling box), there are websites with ideas on what to do with the papers.  I like essortment which has an article on 25 uses for papers.  This is not to encourage you to save but to find uses for those papers that linger over the 2 week period. 

Let the news be the finalization of your sale.

 Photo credit:  newspaper stacks @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/evelynishere/2840299349/

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