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In today’s tough real estate market, you want to give your house every advantage to sell quickly. Staging your home can help your home sell for a good price in a reasonable amount of time. Before you start staging, try to look at your home through the eyes of your buyers. Check out every room of your house from floor to ceiling. It can be hard to be objective about your beloved home, so bring in a friend or family member for an unbiased opinion. After you have completed objective observations, make a list of tasks that need to be accomplished.
Home staging simply means that you make your home as appealing as possible to potential buyers. It can involve cleaning, organizing and decorating. Thankfully, you do not have to be a professional interior designer to stage your home appropriately. Follow these tips to stage your home effectively.
Minimize & Organize: As potential buyers tour your home, they need to be able to picture themselves and their belongings in your house. Therefore, the first step of staging is to eliminate all personal items. Remove your adorable kids’ pictures from the living room wall, move the pile of mail from the entry table and take this week’s grocery list off of the refrigerator. Clutter and knick-knacks make your rooms look smaller. De-cluttering and cleaning are not glamorous tasks, but they will have a huge effect on your home’s appearance. After you minimize the clutter and personal items in your house, give each room a deep cleaning.
Rearrange: You want each room of your home to have an open, inviting feel. To accomplish this, remove additional furniture items, especially bulky or taste-specific pieces. There are stores that rent furniture for home staging, but most sellers do not want this additional expense. Small, inexpensive touches can make a big difference. Add a slip-cover to your old, patterned couch. New throw pillows give new life to your loveseat. Strategically-placed mirrors make your rooms look bigger and brighter. You may have to rearrange the furniture in your living areas several times to find the best layout. Don’t be afraid to experiment until you find the arrangement that shows your room at its best.
Decorate: Now that your home is clean and organized, you can add the cosmetic features that will make your house stand out. One of the most important rules of staging is that you want your house to appeal to a wide variety of buyers. This means that your design choices should not be extreme or taste-specific. Your family might love the bright red wall in your family room, but some potential buyers will only see the cost and effort of repainting it. Make sure that your paint choices are both neutral and current.
Many buyers feel that the kitchen is the most important room of a house. A kitchen remodel is a huge expense, but you can add small, inexpensive touches that will update your kitchen. If your cabinets appear dated, they can be painted or resurfaced instead of being replaced. New hardware for your kitchen cabinets and drawers can give them a modern, updated appearance.
Once your house is properly staged, you will realize that you have many boxes and items that need to be stored. Your first instinct is probably to fill up your closets and garage, but you should reconsider that idea. Buyers want to know that your house has plenty of storage to meet their needs. If your closets are stuffed and your garage is full, your storage appears inadequate and buyers might be afraid that there are problems in the areas that they cannot see.
You do not want to move into your new home with unnecessary items, so this is a great time to have a yard sale. This allows you to downsize your clutter while making some extra cash for your new home! If you can’t part with your items, see if a friend or relative would allow you to use their extra storage space. You can also use a storage unit for short-term rental. This is an additional expense, but it is worth the money to have your home staged properly and sell quickly!
