Downsizing, or getting ready to stage your home for sale? You need to strap on your big kid pants and get radical about clutter – think Marie Kondo on steroids.

It’s the only way if you want to maximise your sale price – and at the same time minimise the exhausting job of packing.

"Generally New Zealanders used to live in their houses their whole life, so they have a lot of clutter," says Wellington-based homestager and interior designer Hazel Maurer, of Staged for Sale. 

”Still, anybody that stays in a house for more than three years accumulates a whole heap of possessions and removing a great percentage of the possessions before they sell is a great idea.”

"If somebody says I want $2.5 million for my house, but you go to their place, and they have old, ugly couches, it's just not going to be perceived as in that price range. One of the key things to think about when decluttering to sell your home is trying to depersonalise it.

"Agents tend not to have a problem if clients put stuff in their garages because buyers can still see how big and what they can fit in a garage with stuff in it."

If you’re planning on staging your home, Maurer suggests starting by packing away all family photos, nicknacks and mementoes from travel. Strip everything back to the bare essentials.

Then you can start culling larger pieces of furniture.

"Sometimes people see a piece of furniture and go, 'Oh my god, I love that'. Then they make a space for it as opposed to having a space for it. They don't have a vision of how it's going to go with everything in their place."

This is your clarion call to stop doing that, and to get rid of anything that you’re not 100% in love with.

Make sure you know the dimensions of the place you’re moving to and have a vision of how you want it to look. Make decisions on what furniture you take with you with that vision firmly in mind.

It might help to make a floor plan of your new home with dimensions of the space and your existing furniture, so you can accurately decide what large items to keep, store, donate, or sell, and what you might need to replace with smaller items.

If you’re downsizing, and need to let go of a significant amount of possessions, this process might be a painful, emotionally draining exercise