Selling your house gives you a to-do list: pack your belongings, forward your mail, swear to the kitchen sink that you’ll never forget it. While all of these things are important, you don’t want your kitchen sink hopes to be dashed, the importance of home improvement weighs heavily. After all, before you can leave your home, you may need to sell it, and before you can, you may need to improve it. The following is a list of the most important things to do before putting your home on the market.

Get a paint job: Few things make a home look worse than peeling paint. Whether it’s on the outside of your home or behind a bedroom door where you think no one will notice, peeling paint is a quick way to find yourself cutting the asking price. Instead of presenting a house that looks sloppy, leaving potential buyers to think that the old paint is just the beginning, buy a few buckets, take a few days and paint everything that needs to be painted in your house. If your home doesn’t need a whole new paint job, just touch up the areas that need some tender loving care.

Remember the little things: We often overlook the little things in favor of looking at the big picture, but it’s the little things that make up the big picture. It’s not only amazing how much attention to small details can dramatically improve your home’s curb appeal, but also how affordable this type of upgrade can be. From something as simple as buying a new shower curtain to redoing the mailbox, from planting flowers in the front yard to putting up new curtains in the living room, the small changes you make can help your whole house look detailed in more ways than one.

Fix what really needs to be fixed: Improving your home before you sell it doesn’t mean you have to fix everything in sight; Chances are, everything in your house could do better: it’s used, after all. Instead of trying to improve everything from the floor to the ceiling, focus on the things that really need fixing. If your carpet doesn’t look new but is good enough to last a few more years, leave it alone and replace the cracked bay window in your living room instead.

Pay special attention to the kitchen and bathrooms: The kitchen and bathroom are two places where we spend a lot of time, albeit for very different reasons. Because we spend a lot of time in these rooms, we also spend time concentrating on them. A dirty bathroom or a kitchen on its last leg will quickly ruin a potential sale. This does not mean that you should neglect all the other rooms in your house, but rather put twice as much effort into them than, for example, the basement.

Use your green thumb or hire someone else who has one: Not all of us have a green thumb; in fact, some of us have an uncanny ability to kill anything with roots. If you don’t have a green thumb, or at least some talent with gardening and landscaping, hire someone who does. Making the exterior of your home look good is just as important as the curb appeal of the interior. Landscaping is the first thing potential buyers will see and notice, and as they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression.