Home Staging
What is home staging? Doing things to make your home look as desirable as possible, whether you are preparing to sell your home or are making improvements for your own enjoyment. There are small things you can do with paint, accessories, furniture placement, cleaning, and organizing. And if you are selling your home, you may find that home staging will help your home sell more quickly and bring a higher price.
Tips for staging a home:
- Cross the street and look at your home for curb appeal. Your attention should be drawn to the door, which should be a rich warm color. Add flowers near the entrance to make it more inviting. If you are selling your home, you want potential buyers to want to enter. Take care of landscaping and maintenance.
- The easiest thing, and often overlooked, is to clean. Try to look at the home with fresh eyes, even bring a friend in and ask them to help point out areas that you might have overlooked. The details can make a difference, so be thorough. If you are trying to sell your home, close cabinets and drawers, make beds, put all the toilet lids down, and hide waste baskets.
- Make your home look bigger by eliminating clutter. If you are selling your home, remove personal items so that potential buyers can picture their own items in the home. And don't push it all into cabinets and closets as buyers will look in those and want to see that there is a lot of storage space.
- Paint. Fresh paint makes a home look better, hides marks and stains on walls and ceilings, and helps with odor. Use neutral colors, with light colors to brighten darker areas and darker colors to highlight trim detail.
- Reduce the amount of furniture in each room to make the room look more spacious. Big furniture makes a room look smaller. And pull furniture away from the walls, 'float' furniture, so buyers will walk around the room instead of just into an empty space in the middle of the room.
- Chairs around a table need at least a 2 foot clearance so a person can pull a chair out to sit, and optimally will have 2-3 feet behind the chair for someone to walk behind it.
- Area rugs should be at least 12-18 inches away from the wall and, if under a dining table, should extend 3-4 feet on all sides.
- Art should generally hang around 8-10 inches above any furniture it is over. For larger pieces, reduce the distance to 4-6 inches.
- Light fixtures need to be sized appropriately for a room. To calculate the size of the light fixture, first measure two adjoining walls in feet and divide by two to get the average wall length. So a 10 by 12 foot room has an average wall length of 11 feet. Next, take the average wall length and multiply it by 2. In the example, we are now 22 feet. Now replace "feet" with "inches," so we find that a light fixture in a 10 by 12 foot room should be 22 inches wide.
- Chandeliers should hang no more than 40 inches from a table, and usually less. For a room with an 8 foot ceiling, the chandelier should hang 30-32 inches above a table. Add 2 inches for each additional foot of ceiling height up to 40 inches.
- Fix anything that is broken or worn like leaky faucets, burned-out light bulbs, holes in walls, etc.
- Organize storage areas like your pantry, closets, or garage. Group similar things together, and line them up neatly.
- If you are selling your home, define spaces. An office should clearly be an office. A guest room should clearly be a guest room. This keeps buyers from having to guess a room's purpose.
- If you are selling your home, set the mood by playing soft music throughout the home (the same music throughout if possible), turning on all lights (even in the daytime), opening curtains and blinds, baking cookies or bread to make an enticing smell, placing fresh flowers and candles around the home, etc.
Sites to try:
-Home staging (wikipedia.org)-How Home Staging Works (howstuffworks.com)
-Home Staging Tips - How to Stage a Home for Sale (homebuyinginstitute.com)
-Home Staging Tips & Tactics (stagingbug.com)