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Posts tagged home staging

Staging for Summer

Jul06
2009
Leave a Comment Written by Carrie

floors

If you are selling your property during the summer season, it is important for prospective buyers to be warmly welcomed into your home. Buy Owner has also expressed that it is vital for sellers to stage their homes, to give potential buyers an idea what their furnished, decorated home may look like. So how do you get your home ready for a summer open house? Here are some summer staging tips:

Foyer

• If your foyer boasts tiling or hardwood flooring, keep the floor open. Remove any area rugs, as layers create unnecessary warmth when the weather is already hot.

• If you want to keep dirt from being tracked into the house, place a small mat right near the door.

• If you have a screen door, keep the main door open to allow for plenty of light to flow through the foyer.

Living Room

• Make sure a comfy chair is seated near the window to offer views of the outdoors; trade a lofty leather recliner for a light whicker rocking chair.

• For decoration, place a vintage screen door, garden gate, or a portion of white picket fencing in the corner of the room.

• Replace dark lampshades with white or cream-colored shades.

Kitchen/Dining Room

• Place a large bowl of fruit/veggies on the table, the counter or an island. Summer fruits include pineapple, peaches, cantaloupe and bananas. Summer vegetables include: tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers.

• Decorate the room with potted plants. Sunflowers brighten the room and give it a summery disposition.

• Cover dining room chairs with a light-colored slip covers.

Bedrooms

• Remove any heavy textures like accent pillows, down pillows, wool blankets.

• Create an airy, simple look on the bed with one or two white pillows, white sheets and a white cover sheet only.

• Exchange a wooden night table for a piece of whicker furniture.

Bathrooms

• Arrange a basket of scented soaps on the vanity; choose light scents like lavender, pomegranate or peach.

• Keep just one towel in the bathroom. Too many layers create too much warmth.

• If you have a shower/tub combo, keep the curtain/sliding door open.

It is not necessary to completely alter every single room in your house for a summer showing. If you making simple changes, lightening and freshening up your home’s decor, potential buyers will get the feel that your home is a comfortable place to live during the summer.

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged decorating, interior design, selling a home, staging
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12 Tips for Staging to Sell

Apr06
2009
1 Comment Written by Shanna

12

It’s a basic fact: Make it easy for buyers to see themselves in your home, and you make it easy for them to make you an offer. The thing that encourages this feeling could be called the secret to the home-selling process: staging. Effective staging should showcase your home’s strengths by opening up the rooms with strategic furniture and décor placement. It uses proper maintenance and appealing aesthetics to woo buyers. Here’s how:
1. Focus on Firsts: First impressions, that is. You only get one chance to make an impression, so the exterior of your home (what buyers see first) matters. Manicure the lawn, trim hedges, plant colorful flowers. Make sure anything that needs to be repaired receives attention. Aim to greet first-time visitors with a WOW factor.

2. Clean: Concentrate on the main living areas and the focal points of the home, the spots that guests are most likely to see. Ideally, you’ll want to work thoroughly through this step, getting into every nook and cranny of your residence. However, if you’re crunched for time, don’t worry so much about the less noticeable places.

3. Declutter: Especially in high-traffic areas like hallways, remove every bit of unnecessary stuff. Whether this means selling, putting things away in storage or giving donations to Goodwill, it’s time. Once your home sells, you’ll be moving anyway, so it makes sense.

4. Depersonalize: The point is not to make your home look sterile and stripped of character, but to make it neutral and inviting so a wide variety of potential buyers can envision themselves living there.

5. Draw in Sunlight: There’s nothing better than natural light. Open curtains, remove anything blocking windows and allow as much natural light into each room as possible. Bright spaces will appear larger, not to mention more aesthetically pleasing.

6. Add Strategic Lighting: Direct your lighting to highlight key pieces, such as the fireplace, built-ins or the dining area! Recessed lighting and dimmers can adjust to complement any kind of daylight, and track lighting can focus in on specific areas of a room. Every light should be deliberately placed to lead the eye toward a different part of the room.

7. Create Groupings: From a couch and two chairs to a loveseat with a side table and an accent piece, individual groupings, sometimes called scenes, are sectioned areas that draw the eye and create the illusion of space.

8. Think about Details: Take simple steps to increase the interior appeal by throwing a soft, colorful (not gaudy) blanket over a piece of furniture; adding an accent piece in an area you want to focus on; add scented soaps to each of the bathrooms; make sure that your laundry machines, the dishwasher, or other loud appliances aren’t running while visitors are in your home. The key is not to mask your home’s weaknesses, but to enhance its strengths. You are staging your home for an important date; make sure it is staged to perfection!

9. Add Visual Interest to Rooms: This previous Buy Owner Blog article offers some great tips for maintaining visual interest. Examine your rooms with a fresh perspective and ask yourself what a new buyer would see. Use decorating accents to draw buyers towards selling points: the fireplace, the gleaming hardwood floors, the elegant crown molding.

10. Get a Fresh Perspective: Ask a friend to come over and look at the way you’ve reorganized things. Ask him or her to imagine being a prospective buyer and see if this gives you a new way of looking at your rooms.

11. Appeal to the Senses: On the day of a showing, try to appeal to all five of a buyer’s senses. Visually, your home needs to be clean, well-decorated and arranged. But also, it should smell good (see this Buy Owner article for tips) and feel good (let buyers enter rooms before you do to maximize the sense of space). Putting out fresh coffee and cookies takes care of taste, and you might choose to have soft music playing in the background to complete the mood.

12. Spruce up the Backyard: Backyards have become a big selling point for people looking to purchase a home.

The ultimate principle to remember in home staging is simple: Get buyers to see themselves (not you) living in your home. Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to a great showing!

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged home ownership, real estate selling, selling a home, selling real estate, staging, staging homes
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Top 10 Home Staging Tips

Feb16
2009
1 Comment Written by Shanna

Top-10-Staging-Tips At its heart, staging is about setting the stage for potential buyers, making it easy for them to imagine themselves living in your home. Here are some ways to do just that:

1. Focus on first impressions: You only get one chance to make a solid first impression, and those initial 10 seconds can make or break your sale. Look at your front entryway: It is the first part of your home to greet your guests and gives them something to study as you amble up to open it, so you don’t want a door that is flawed in any way.
2. Create curb appeal: Part of a buyer’s first impression will be dictated by your landscaping and the outdoor maintenance of your property. Manicure the bushes, mow the lawn, plant pretty flowers. In winter, shovel the driveway and salt down walkways. Work to create an impressive exterior, one that will draw buyers in!
3. Declutter: Get rid of all clutter—anything that you don’t need, put away. Rent a storage space if you have to. Doing this will make the rooms appear larger and full of potential, ideal for helping the buyer imagine living in the home.
4. Clean: Clean your home from top to bottom. Everything should be spotless, like a show home. Get inside the cabinets and drawers, too: potential buyers will open everything.
5. Freshen up smells: A pleasant aroma will invite guests into your home and it might even distract them from any clutter you didn’t have time to clean up. On the day of a showing, try baking a delicious treat, letting the scent waft through the entire house. Check out this post for some ideas on eliminating odors in your house.
6. Paint with neutral colors: If you repaint, choose neutral colors that could accommodate a variety of tastes. Remember, your preferences don’t matter here—this is about appealing to the largest number of potential buyers. Also, avoid stark whites in favor of warm creams and beiges.
7. Fix ups: This should be obvious, but it is worth saying—if anything is broken, fix it or have it fixed! Buyers want homes that are move-in-ready, not homes that need work done. Have you been waiting to replace the broken window in the bathroom, or were you putting off cleaning or replacing the stained carpeting in the living areas? Do it now!
8. Create clusters: Be willing to experiment with your furniture arrangements. Make sure that high-traffic areas are clear of excess furnishings to maximize space, and reposition sofas and chairs into cozy conversational groups. Arrange things to make the path for traffic flow obvious.
9. Details: Essentially, staging is about uniting various elements into one cohesive design. Think about details: An odd number of accessories is preferred, especially threes. Consider scale and placement when arranging knick-knacks, or try grouping them by color, texture or shape.
10. Turn on the lights: To make your home more inviting, increase the wattage in your lamps and fixtures to 100 watts for every 50 square feet.

Stage your home effectively, and you are on your way to a speedy and successful sale. Remember to focus on appealing to the largest pool of buyers and to do everything you can to put your home’s best foot forward!

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged home decorating, real estate, selling a home, staging, staging a home
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Visual Interest: Watching Where Eyes Go

Dec18
2008
Leave a Comment Written by Shanna

This holiday season, when you have a steady traffic flow through your home and when you are rearranging decorations, take the opportunity to examine the visual interest of your living spaces! Step into a room—or ask a loved one for their perspective—and see what immediately grabs your eye. Those are the same things that will grab a buyer’s eyes, so you want to make sure the features that stand out as focal points deserve to be getting so much attention!

Essentially, this advice is Staging 101: Use a fresh perspective to see what areas need addressing. If you immediately notice a stain on the carpeting, get it cleaned. If there’s a crack in the window, get it fixed. Anything that you can’t replace or fix, do your best to downplay.

Use decorating accents to instead draw buyers towards selling points: the fireplace, the gleaming hardwood floors, the elegant crown molding. How can you do this? Consider these suggestions:

1. To Downplay the Television: Especially if you have a television in the same room as your fireplace or some other attractive centerpiece, you will want to downplay it. Try tucking the T.V. away in a cabinet or an entertainment center.
2. Focus on the Bed: In the master bedroom especially, the bed should be the center of attention. Outfit it with clean, unwrinkled sheets/comforter, adding decorative pillows if desired. To add visual height, you could try a tall headboard or dramatic art behind the bed.
3. Showcase Hardwood Floors: The best way to emphasize wood flooring is to get it in immaculate condition and clear out the space so the floors can be seen.
4. General Tips: Whether you’re highlighting built-in bookcases or an attractive dresser, there are some general rules of thumb to help:
a. Color: Designing a room to have an overall neutral theme allows you to add very noticeable pops of color as desired.
b. Fabric: Bold prints will draw attention. Sometimes a very well-constructed window will look its best simply with no accents, particularly if it boasts an impressive view. Other times, you may want to decorate the window with interesting fabrics for draperies.

Remember, the ultimate test of good design is practice. Ask your friends to give their first impressions of your reorganized rooms and see what features are popping out to them. Use their feedback, coupled with your perspective, to make the most of your home’s style!

Posted in Home Improvement, Tips and Ideas - Tagged architecture, fabric, focal point, interior design, real estate, real estate tips, windows
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Playing Up Selling Points: Built-Ins

Nov03
2008
Leave a Comment Written by Shanna

Marketing your home is all about showcasing its strong points. Whether those points are gorgeous panoramic views, prime placement in the heart of the city, lush landscaping or incredible interior features, every home has something that makes it special.

One feature that’s often found in quality-built older homes is built-ins. Buyers love built-ins. They add space to a room, creating areas for organization and displays. And nothing says character like custom shelving and bookcases, built right into the walls flanking a fireplace.

So if your home features these customizations, make the most of them! Here’s how:

1. Declutter: Probably the best way to begin this project is to remove everything from the shelves/cabinets completely. Give them a good cleaning, and then think about what should be displayed. Anything you don’t want anymore or don’t think should be showcased, put away. Anything gaudy, put away. Anything that will detract from your built-ins, put away.

2. Create groups: From the remaining items, try to arrange neutral, simple things together, making sure that they enhance the shelving rather than draw attention away from it. You want buyers to imagine their things on the built-ins, as they’re imagining themselves buying your home.

3. Showcase books: If you don’t feel comfortable creating clusters of items, another time-tested option is to use bookcases what they were originally intended for: books. Consider grouping them by color or by size, giving the shelves a sense of organization. If you don’t have enough books to fill the shelves, group them in sections of five to ten. If you have too many books, pare down.

Remember that to a buyer, built-ins are custom furniture included with your home. Emphasize the value of these features by showcasing them at their finest, and buyers are sure to notice.

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged built-in bookcases, built-ins, home decorating, real estate tips, selling a home, staging a home
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Here’s the Secret to Selling Your Home!

Jun26
2008
3 Comments Written by Alexis

Interior Design

Selling a home can be stressful, and, with so much to do, sellers often overlook what may be a crucial factor.

Think about this: buyers want to be able to picture themselves in the house as if it’s their own. The thing that encourages this feeling could be called the secret to the home-selling process: staging.

An integral part of selling a house, staging consists of redesigning current décor to accentuate a home’s assets and characteristics. Some sellers even hire professional stagers to ready their home for the real estate market.

Here are some general ideas to get you started:

PROBLEM-SOLVING

Problem: Bare walls. Houses without any furnishings often seem vacant and prospective buyers have trouble envisioning the empty space as a welcoming room.

Solution: Consider renting or borrowing furniture to give the home a lived-in feeling. Some sellers choose to buy furniture and sell it with the house, sell it in a later yard sale or donate it to charity.

Problem: Too much information. Personal mementos and unnecessary clutter can detract from a home’s natural beauty and architectural detailing.

Solution: Minimize. Begin by renting a storage unit to house unnecessary belongings and clutter. If you cannot afford this, neatly box the excess material and place it in a garage, an attic or a similar storage space.

OTHER TIPS:

Placement, placement, placement. Be willing to experiment with your furniture arrangements. Make sure that high-traffic areas are clear of excess furnishings to maximize space. Reposition sofas and chairs into cozy conversational groups, and place pieces so that the traffic flow in the room is obvious. Don’t push your furniture against the walls, assuming that this will make the room appear larger.

Color! While painting may seem trivial, the right shade or hue can turn an outdated disaster into a modern marvel. Try to select neutral colors that will complement any buyer’s personal design style. Avoid stark whites in favor of warm creams and beiges. If you are selling a home with some history, don’t be afraid to do some research. Victorian homes, or painted ladies, are traditionally known for their vibrant colors both inside and out. Buyers will find this dedication to historical accuracy appealing.

Accessories. Staging is about uniting various elements into one cohesive design. Buyers will be interested at in every minute detail, from the creative layout to the furniture to the seemingly insignificant accents. An odd number of accessories is preferred, especially threes. Consider scale and placement when arranging knick-knacks, or try grouping them by color, texture or shape.

Lighting. Lighting determines how a room is perceived. Light affects color and ambiance, two important aspects of staging. To make your home more inviting, increase the wattage in your lamps and fixtures to 100 watts for every 50 square feet. Then install dimmers so you can vary light levels according to your mood and the time of day. Place mirrors, silver or glass bowls or other reflective objects near lamps to bounce light around the room and make it glow even more.

Test of Time. Try to renovate anything that potential buyers might view as old or outdated. This can mean an expensive overhaul, or, alternatively, some very clever, inexpensive solutions. Place peal-and-stick tiles over old flooring. Remove wallpaper or, if you don’t have the time or the patience, simply paint over it.

Aromas. Keep in mind that odors can linger in a house for days. That pungent fish you had for dinner might have tasted good, but the overpowering scent may have cost you a sale. On the day of the open house, try baking a delicious treat, letting the scent waft through the entire house. Want more tips on scent, see this Buy Owner Blog article.

Green living. Plants and flowers are an inexpensive way to breathe life into a room. Fresh flowers will add color, warmth and appeal to an otherwise dull room. A bowl of fresh fruit works well, too.

Expert opinions. Try consulting design magazines for tips and tricks. Find a room picture that you find appealing and isolate the components that set that room apart. Maybe they arranged the artwork in a unique way or utilized natural light to illuminate a certain detail. Notice how these rooms seem universal, while still retaining a sense of style.

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged buy owner selling tips, how to sell your home, real estate selling, seling buy owner, selling by owner, selling for sale by owner, selling fsbo, Selling Tips, the secret to home selling
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Why Staging Works

Dec18
2007
1 Comment Written by Shanna

Staging1

Staging is about emotion. It’s about creating a sensory experience for buyers that will so impress them, they don’t just like or desire your property; they are in love with and have to have it. Staging doesn’t just tell the buyer about the home or ask for a little imagination; it puts all the pieces in place, leaving no detail out. It makes it easy for the buyer to make an offer; in fact, it makes it hard not to.

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of staging, this may sound too good to be true. But trust us: it’s a fact.

Effective staging turns a house into a home, a home that radiates warmth and comfort. It creates a magnificent first impression and encourages a higher asking price.

If you’re interested in selling your home faster and for more money, think about staging. According to at least one study, a staged home is usually on the market for less than half the time.

Staging is, in fact, the secret weapon of home sellers. It’s the incredibly important, can’t-be-overlooked tool to making your home stand out to potential buyers.

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged selling your home
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Smile for the Camera: Staging your Home

Oct16
2007
4 Comments Written by Sarah

Staging your home for sale goes beyond a few basic repairs and a fresh coat of paint–you are dressing your home for a date with its potential new owner. 

While countless designers are focused on professional home staging, there are plenty of ways to enrich and enliven the look of your home, on your own, with a few simple adjustments. 

The key to perfect staging is to please all of the senses, making your home both photo-friendly and welcoming to visitors, while keeping simplicity in mind.

Create a Scene

The primary goal in staging is to create individual vignettes: try pulling together a couch and two seats to form an intimate sitting area, or pair a loveseat with a side table and an accent piece.  Each of these “scenes” should be lit independent of each other.  This makes the room seem active in its design, and directs the eye to different areas of the room.  Direct your track, can, or recessed lighting to highlight key pieces, such as the fireplace, built-ins, or the dining area!

Direct Your Lighting

Just like in the movies, lighting is everything.  A few moves can add drama and ambience to even the most common rooms.  Recessed lighting and dimmers can adjust to complement any kind of daylight, and track lighting can focus in on specific areas of a room. Carefully placed up-lighting can highlight key objects from below, such as indoor plants or an art piece.  Every light should be deliberately placed to lead the eye toward a different part of the room.

Don’t Forget the Sunlight

Allow as much natural light into each room as possible.  Bright spaces appear larger, and the easiest way to achieve this is by opening your blinds, or pulling back your window treatments.  Even if the room has potential for being bright, your home buyer will never see this with dark and shadowy lighting!

Set the Mood

Now that you have achieved visual perfection, you must appeal to the other senses.  Take simple steps by throwing a soft, colorful (not gaudy) blanket over a piece of furniture.  This can be an accent piece as well, so place it in an area you might want to focus upon.  Add scented soaps to each of the bathrooms (don’t spray half a can of air freshener before your visitors arrive), and make sure that your laundry machines, the dishwasher, or other loud appliances aren’t running while visitors are in your home.  The key is not to mask your home’s weaknesses, but to enhance its strengths through subtle detail.  You are staging your home for an important date; make sure it is staged to perfection!

Posted in Selling Tips, Tips and Ideas - Tagged home decorating, preparing to sell, selling your home
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