Getting an appraisal on your home.. anything I should do?

I have never done anything except clean.

Funny story - I was making my children help clean the house for the appraiser. Not long after, we had an appointment for the city tax assessor to come through. The kids starting whining about having to clean the house. I told them no, we want it to look bad, so mess it up! The looks on their faces was priceless. They were disappointed I did not actually let them make a mess.

I'm in the "guy drove by fast" camp.  

Good luck to you!

This is essentially what we had.  They took a photo of the front of the house from the street, the rest of the information seemed to be pulled from the tax files.  The report also included photos & sales comps of several comparable homes in the area that had sold within the last year.  

Mine was recently appraised and it was painless. I didn't do anything to prepare. He walked around the house, looked in each room from the hallway, looked at the yard, and left. I think he did look in the furnace room, never opened the garage at all.

You *might* have an issue with the hot water heater.  If it uses natural gas to heat, it must have an inspection certificate, due to the possible instant combustible factor.  in our area, you can install yourself but it must have a seal from a licensed professional.  Hope that they don't look at this.

After years of getting the drive-by appraisal, I was surprised at our last one when the appraiser went room to room, taking photos and asking questions about the age of things (furnace/air con) and ownership (solar panels).

He told me our zip code was flagged for detailed appraisals because of a wildfire through the area a few months earlier. 

That appraisal was in 2012. Maybe it had something to do with the credit union that holds our mortgage was doing the refinance? No idea.

Here the hot water tanks are required to have Earthquake straps as well.  I'm not in California either.  

We had an appraisal done a couple of years ago for a Home Equity Line. They went to the wrong house!! Now granted we live in a rural area, and they "looked" at the house in front of us and they have the same last name as us and there was a Monogrammed wreath on the door. I called the banker and told her it was unacceptable and to use another appraisal firm. I was not going to accept anything from those incompetent firm. Our house numbers are well displayed.

I’ve refinanced my house two times over the last 35 years of owning it and I’ve never met or even seen the appraiser.  They just check records and did a drive by inspection.  

I actually discussed doing a refi last month and the banker told me that they would just do a drive by to make sure the house was standing and looked okay.  I told him that 1/2 of my front yard was currently plain dirt since I was in the process of redoing all my landscaping from grass to drought tolerant and still needed to finish the final section.  He said that was fine, that the appraiser would be able to see that it was in that process.  I ended up deciding against doing the refi, but had I gone ahead, I didn’t even need to be home for an inspection.  My house is 35 years old, so I thought it would require a more thorough inspection, but apparently not.

ETA:  I should add that this was the banker’s opinion, the appraiser might have had other ideas/requirements and would have needed to inspect the entire house.

Huh. I’m surprised at how many don’t even come in. We were checking our value after our home renovations, so I wanted them to see everything! (In just under three years, our home’s value is now double what we paid, so I’m extremely happy we did the appraisal! It makes all the hard work we’ve done over the last few years worth it!)