BYE, BYE CLUTTER. One of the most important things you can do to prepare your home for sale is to get rid of clutter. The major contributor to a cluttered look is having too much furniture. When professional stagers descend on a home being prepped for market, they often take away as much as half the owner’s furnishings, and the house looks bigger for it. Take a hard look at what you have and ask yourself what you can live without.