5 Steps to Staging the Perfect Home
Home design shows, especially those about selling your home, are all about staging – arranging your home to look its absolute best. If you can’t get expert help to stage your home consider hiring an interior designer or enlisting the help of a friend to view your home through a stranger’s eyes and make it look its best.
In the meantime, follow these five basic rules to market your property to potential buyers.
1. Clean Deep
Clean, tidy homes are enormously more attractive than cluttered spaces.
Especially for people who’ve lived in their space for a long time, accumulated clutter can obscure the value of a home by making it look smaller, dirtier and less functional.
Either embark on a de-cluttering mission or commit the majority of your possessions to storage (or a relative’s home) in order to remove all extraneous details.
For essential items, store behind closet doors or inside decorative baskets. With so few items in place, it might not look natural – but that’s fine. You’re aiming for the look of a catalogue or furniture storeroom.
2. Maximize Light
Once your place is clean, you shouldn’t be shy about throwing light into every corner. Open all the windows and blinds and have at least two sources of light available in every room.
Nothing’s worse than an empty room lit by a single overhead light. It makes a space feel sterile and small. Buy or borrow standing lamps to fill corners with light. Move table lamps to maximize the light they cast in a room.
Use the illumination as a tool to highlight features in the home, such as a reading corner or a task area in the kitchen.
3. Use What You Have
Take that assortment of vases, set of fine china and candle collection out of storage and put them to use. While you don’t want to increase clutter, a well-placed design touch on empty countertops and tables could provide a homey feeling.
Use those beautiful vases for fresh flowers, which will smell great and brighten the room. Just remember to refresh them when they start to droop.
4. Show Possibilities
When staging, the aim is not to create the perfect model home but rather to showcase all the possibilities of the space.
Make note of features that should be selling points of your space that you don’t personally use – clean an unused grill or put some bar glasses by an entertaining sink.
You may need to edit down your furniture – most homes have too much. Place the remaining pieces in functional ways by creating a conversation area adjacent to the kitchen or a sitting area on the patio.
Any room that you’re using mostly to store miscellaneous items should be emptied.
5. Stay True to the ‘Hood – and You
Most real estate agents will recommend home sellers stick with neutral colors and furnishings. While a crisp, clean palette frequently can benefit a space keep in mind your personal style as well as your location. If neutrals aren’t your thing, add colors to the walls that fit the climate and style of your neighborhood, which will help bring the outdoors in but won’t make your style stick out like a sore thumb in the event you do choose to put the home on the market in the not-so-distant future.