Leah and Joe: Home DIY Projects & Crafts

5 Tips for Staging your House

If you’re in the midst of trying to sell your house, you know how stressful it can be. But if you follow some of these basic tips, it doesn’t have to be hard.

1. Get help – A staging person has a great eye and experience. When in doubt, have someone walk through your house and uncover your blind spots. Many realtors offer to include this for free and have connections in the industry who consistently stage houses that sell.
2. Borrow – Ask friends and family for select pieces of furniture before footing a bill on new things. Thrift shops and consignment stores can be your best friend.
3. Keep it simple – Neutral paint colors, sparse furniture and minimalistic decorations are the name of the game. Clean, clean, clean! I could say it again. It makes such a difference. People like to envision what they could do to a space, not see that someone’s living there.
4. Storage – Invest in a storage unit, or rely on friends and family to hide away your clutter. Nobody wants to walk into the garage and see mountains of odds and ends. On that note, hide away anything that is valuable to you. If someone makes an offer, they may ask for you to leave that favorite rug or those expensive pillows behind in order to seal the deal.
5. Breathe  – This is a process with lots of moving pieces. Get yourself a good team and do what you can to best prepare your home for showings. After that, let go and trust that things will work out. It’s important to get good sleep during this transition and eat healthy (even if you’re not able to use your kitchen.) It can feel chaotic, but it will all be worth it once you get a happy buyer for your house 🙂

 

Stage Presence

Here’s how we did it. We were pretty confident in our staging abilities, and guess what? We didn’t do too bad! When Barb the professional came in, we didn’t have a whole lot to change. Mainly this is because we had already cleansed the premises and shipped all our possessions off to various garages.

If you’re currently trying to stage your home, you don’t necessarily need to hire a professional staging person. Although, you may find it helpful. Luckily Joe’s parents had some furniture to lend us and his mom got to be the personal shopper for staging. I’ll try to give as many details as I can.

 

Here’s the drawing Barb drew up for us. The size and orientation of wall art is apparently pretty important. We tilted a painting in the entryway from horizontal to vertical. Huge change, I know. We also bought a few paintings (to be returned later) and added some floor lamps and strategically-placed mirrors to make certain rooms look larger.

Joe’s mom found this round glass table for the sun room at a consignment shop. I feel like it’s when I want a shirt that the mannequin is wearing, and that’s the only one in my size. I have to ask, “Excuse me, can you take this down for me?”

Behold, the game room. Where you and your family can hash it out over Monopoly. We only had the bare essentials in-house at that point. Our running joke while hosting house showings was, If we ever get bored we can play Monopoly. Luckily, it never came to that.

TJ Maxx, Home Goods and Marshalls were hot spots for staging essentials.

They have quiiiite the selection of beachy bathroom decor.

 The backyard was fun too! We just had to apply some fresh wood chips and put out the patio furniture.

 

The living room/dining room looked like a million bucks!

We moved up the ottoman from the movie room.

And replaced the chaise lounge with a taupe armchair.

Steve’s mom gave us this smaller couch. We were told to put a big mirror behind it.

As for the wall art, it was a clear choice.

The two small mirrors looked good, unfortunately only big mirrors were allowed.

Feels so nice.

The kitchen was as clean as I’ve maybe ever seen it.

Do you like this? It could be yours for only $39.99 at Target.

The ominous horses. This matched the downstairs bathroom too perfectly.

They will stare you down when you leave the shower.

Here is the staging cookbook.

We were instructed to get three olive oil bottles. Two are new, and we can’t wait to taste them. One has lemon and the other has chilis inside. The champagne was our idea 🙂

 We set the dining area oh so nicely. But we couldn’t eat at home. Such a tease.

Notice the photo bomber? I was painting right before the first showing, 15 minutes later.

I’m apparently getting sad from being in a state of limbo. Next month can’t come soon enough!

I think the Girl Scout cookies are what sweetened the deal when people came to the open houses.