House Crush

house crush white modern DIY

 

Joe worked on a house a few months ago, in Stillwater MN, and we were invited to their open house for the grand reveal. It was such a beautiful place! And some of the nicest people ever. Joe did a lot of the behind-the-scenes work: installed a new furnace, reworked some dryer vents, fresh air intake, moved some duck work and some other small fixes. This house was redone from head to toe, and was stunning when it was all finished!

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5 Tips for Staging your House

setting the stage banner

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.

 

staging layout drawing

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Behind the Scenes

Spring Cleaning

 

Elbow Grease

It was truly March Madness for us – A month for the record books. We put an offer on a house, had it contingently accepted, had to make a mad dash to sell a house, and a bunch of aftermath that we’re currently weeding through. There were many, many things that needed to take place in order for everything to fall exactly into place. There was probably some divine intervention, because whatever took place was of superhuman effort. Good thing we know some pretty super humans 🙂

This is a sampling of what we needed to do. The majority of our work was taping, mudding, prepping walls, painting walls, shampooing carpet, getting everything into boxes and out of the house, repainting coats of paint and generally polishing and deep cleaning every square inch. Joe’s house cleaned up pretty nicely! But few of us got to be behind the scenes. Lemme tell you, it wasn’t so pretty. But it was all worth it in the end.

To-Do Lists

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Life Hacking

Life Hack header

Lifestyle Design

Aren’t there things you wish you had a say in designing? Like your office chair that never reclines far enough, or your quirky front door that needs to be shut just right for it to lock. Or that your coffee pot would start brewing your morning mocha (aka starter fluid) on a schedule each morning? Maybe it’s just for your family to have access to one calendar; everyone can update it on-the-go.

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Fresh Canvas

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New Works of Art

Ok, not the finest art but hey. I like simple pick-me-ups. I spotted these mini canvases, where else but at Menards. I was just rummaging through them and found 2 that I just couldn’t leave without. Actually 3, but I made myself choose just two.

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Bathroom Remodel: Phase Two

Ok, you can come in now!Onto Phase Two

There was a lot of good grunt work that went into this one, but it went pretty smoothly once we got our process down.

We couldn’t be happier with how the whole bathroom turned out!

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Bathroom Remodel

Enter the bathroom

Tiling and Painting

Since we did the dual shower heads, we decided to extend Project Bathroom Renovation. Come check it out!

DSC01908Enter if you dare

We noticed some mold spots starting to come through the paint in the shower, so we took the chance to do our first ever tiling job. The previous homeowners had only an eggshell paint in the bathroom, which was just asking for mold spores.

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Shower in the Rain

singin' in the rain shower

“It’s like being under a waterfall in your bathroom!”

That’s what our new best friend at Menards said when he helped us with this project. He had a cool blue tape measure so we knew he was a good guy. Here’s what we walked in with – straight out of Joe’s head.

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