Staging Your Home
Staging is the best way to get top dollar for your home when you prepare to sell. Homes that are staged sell faster and for more money. Staging sets the scene for your buyer to say, ¿I could live here!¿
What is staging? Staging is not ¿interior design.¿ Interior designers create an environment based on the specific choices of their client. Color, wallpaper, carpet, furniture styles-even interior lighting-are all picks meant to complement that client¿s specific likes and dislikes. Staging, on the other hand, aims at suggesting how a room might look, or how space might be used. In marketing, your home is a stage!
The task is to create a setting that will draw attention from the biggest number of Buyers. Start by sprucing up. Because color is such a personal taste, staging usually revolves around a neutral palette. If your teen has decorated using strange colors, repaint in Benjamin Moore¿s white linen. Clean your toddler¿s crayon pictures off the walls. Box up toys and clutter. Have your home professionally cleaned, if necessary.
Next, be willing to let your stager reorganize your furnishings to better take advantage of space. Good staging offers warm and charming scenes¿a breakfast table set with stemware and linen, perhaps a big, cuddly stuffed bear in a child¿s playroom, or one spectacular piece of furniture in a highly visible spot such as a foyer. Leave a china teacup and saucer on a tray or coffee table to suggest that yours is a wonderfully livable home. This is a place where a Buyer can relax, curl up with a good book, and sip afternoon tea! Additionally, be willing to live in your ¿stage¿ until your house is sold.
In a vacant home or in the case of new construction, staging might mean wonderful new towels and soaps placed in a bath, a fabulous console table in a foyer, fresh flowers, and a gorgeous chair or settee in front of a window. Think about the model homes you have seen, and you will understand staging better. The total look should be elegant, friendly and inviting. Remember, you want a buyer to say, ¿Oh yes, I could live here!¿
Selling? Please feel free to consult me. Remember that I often add my own collection of fabulous furnishings to the mix.
