“You can do this!” I told her. “Take all the laundry — clean, dirty, all of it — and put it in baskets in your car”

“I have another potential buyer,” I said, the phone on speaker while I drove, “but they want to come in two hours! Can you make that happen?”

There’s silence, and I can imagine Stephanie Wilson looking around her house in a panic. Stephanie was outgoing and funny and loved doing crafts with her two kids. But as her father always told her, she was “a great kid, but no Martha Stewart.”

Her home had been on the market for months but nothing had moved forward. The contract with her first agent had ended and she reached out to me. I walked into the house and immediately spotted the problem. Stephanie took a very relaxed approach to laundry. There was dirty laundry on nearly every bed, and clean laundry in haphazard piles on the couch and dining room table. Before I brought the first potential buyer, I asked her to straighten up, but presumably she was so used to the situation that she hadn’t even noticed it. The potential buyers definitely did — when they turned down the house, they commented on it. Something had to change.

“You can do this!” I told her. “Take all the laundry — clean, dirty, all of it — and put it in baskets in your car.”