Isn’t it true that your home never looks better than when you are trying to sell it? This was certainly true for us when we sold our last home about three years ago. In fact, our old home looked so good there during showings that I was really wondering if we should have been selling it at all.
The key that made our old home more inviting was some careful staging on our part. Now, we didn’t pay for a professional staging company to come, but we certainly read all that we could about staging, asked a lot of questions from realtors, looked at photos of professionally staged homes and put all of those tips into place.
Staging a home is a lot different from arranging things for comfort when your focus is actually living in the home instead of selling it, but there are plenty of ways to adapt professional staging advice to make your home more inviting all of the time.
The biggest piece of staging advice is to eliminate objects. Too much stuff makes a home feel cluttered and suffocating. While your taste doesn’t have to be stark, the full lived-in look isn’t necessarily inviting. To adapt this less is more tip, go through your home and see what catches your eye. Is it a beautiful piece of artwork, or bookshelves that are overstuffed? Reduce the number of books on your bookshelf (store or donate the extras), the number of clothes in your closet, and the number of displayed objects. This is a quick fix that will yield surprising results.
Another piece of advice from professional stagers is to go neutral. But this doesn’t mean what it sounds like. You don’t have to paint all of your walls beige, for example. It is more a matter of making everything flow harmoniously with no one thing screaming out at you. For example, our newly renovated half-bathroom has red walls, but the red is subdued in tone and is off-set well by other neutral elements in the room, such as the beige granite countertop of the sink and the beige of the floor tile.
Want to learn more about adapting staging to make YOUR home more inviting? Just leave a comment below!