Hide the teenagers and the toilet roll! Why does my estate agent want my house to look like nobody lives in it? | Zoe Williams

I’ve been asked to put away the dog bed – and even my shower gel. Surely prospective buyers should know that I’ll take all my mess with me when I leave Trying to sell a house is pretty much a once-a-decade event for me, so I shouldn’t be surprised that times have changed. When I sold my first flat in 2006, the norm was actively anti-tidy. Obviously you’d spirit away food waste and animal detritus, maybe you’d put a lid on your laundry basket, but the market was overheated; everything was nonsensically expensive. In that respect it was much like it is now, except that back then, we were still s

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