Natural light is maybe the most requested feature from home buyers. Everyone wants it and it’s impossible to create more of. If your house has poor natural light, many of its best features (the kitchen, the mouldings, and so on) are likely to get lost in the dim.

What can you do to maximize natural light in your home? Here are five suggestions from experienced, accredited stagers.

1. Remove Your Screens

Do you have window screens? Do you need them? If you don’t frequently open your windows, consider removing them altogether. They really only exist to keep out bugs and debris and if your windows are usually closed they’re creating a five o’ clock shadow on your house.

2. Clean Your Windows

Are your windows dirty? You’d be shocked how much light is blocked by dirty, streaked windows! A good cleaning (Windex and newspaper works wonders!) will let in a lot more light than you realized you had.

3. Take Down Some Wall Hangings
You don’t want your walls to look too blank, but paintings, posters, and tapestries will absorb light and break up the long, airy expanses of your walls. Minimize hanging art in the rooms you want to feel brighter and notice how the light you do have will actually bounce around the room.

4. Hang Some Mirrors
Mirrors automatically amplify the amount of natural light in your home by reflecting it from room to room. Cool, huh? They not only tend to make spaces feel bigger, they bounce light off of your windows to make a room feel brighter and airier to boot.

5. Lighten Up

Your color palette, that is. The lighter your furniture, window treatments, and wall colors, the brighter the space will feel. Dark colors have a tendency to absorb any natural light that hits them. Swap out just a few key pieces for lighter fabrics or do a re-paint of the walls in a particularly dark room and immediately notice a difference.

Natural light is a fantastic feature, and you probably get more of it than you think! Be sure to play up the spaces that get tons of light by situating furniture away from windows, and draw the eye away from spaces that don’t get a ton by moving the focal point of the room.

And whatever you do, take down that old 1990s valance once and for all!