Investing in home staging is the biggest bang for your buck.
Along with this, another great investment for selling your property is painting. Recently, in the past few years, the new trend is to paint wood work (including door and window casings, mouldings, wainscoting, etc). There are many older homes in the Toronto area that still have wood paneling and casings all around the house. Some in parts of the house. These homes tend to show their age as rooms often appear darker as well as dated. If you look at the new home builds, they paint their wood casings and paneling.
There are still a lot of buyers looking for old age charm but definitely not old worn out wood.
With this in mind, it would be highly costly to start removing and repairing. A more effective and cost efficient solution is to paint over existing wood with a new fresh coat of paint. This will give the property an instant update while still maintaining the integrity of an older home.