How to Dress Your House for Sale Success
Try these home staging tips to turn your home into buyer bait.
Ever walk into an open house or a model home and notice how… well, inhumanly perfect it looks? If so, chances are the property is “staged.”
In real estate parlance, that means the place has been dressed with paint, furniture arrangements, art and accessories carefully chosen to highlight the home’s strengths, downplay its weaknesses, and appeal to the greatest number of prospective buyers.
Whether you’re designing to sell or designing to dwell, here’s how the home-staging pros get that “I have to have it!” look. These tips and tricks can make your own humble abode look like a million bucks.
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Recommendation 2. Conquer clutter
Admit it: You have too much stuff. “The most important thing most people can do to improve their home is to clear out, clean up, and get rid of clutter,” says Lisa LaPorta, cast designer on HGTV’s hit show “Designed to Sell” and owner of Lisa LaPorta Design in Los Angeles.
Be ruthless as you go about purging your belongings. If you haven’t used it in three months, stagers say, box it up and store it away; if you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it. And make a house rule that for every new item that comes in, an old one has to leave. Any mixed feelings you have about tossing life’s accumulated detritus will quickly be replaced with a sense of relief and appreciation of your Zen-like new surroundings.
Sound daunting? Take it one room at a time. If your bookshelves are bursting at the seams, for instance, “clear them off and start over,” suggests Michelle Yackel, owner of Divine Redesigns in Atlanta. “It’s okay to have empty space around your books and knickknacks.” Inexpensive baskets make great hiding places for unsightly paperbacks, and add texture and visual interest. Books stacked vertically serve as pedestals to show off prized pottery or other objects d’art. You can even remove the dust covers from hardbacks and group them by color, turning a busy jumble into a decorative addition to the room.
If you simply can’t part with your collection of Architectural Digests or your kids won’t let you near the 300 carefully assembled Lego creations stacked on their dresser, it’s time to get creative about storage and organization. Retailers like the Container Store and Target sell handy rolling bins designed to slip under a bed and hide everything from household supplies to kids’ toys. And if you can’t get rid of it and can’t hide it, flaunt it with style: “Places like IKEA sell colorful and inexpensive fabric, cardboard, or melamine magazine holders. Lined up on a shelf, they look a lot cleaner than stacks of magazines everywhere and add a unified visual element to the room,” says Michael Friedes, owner of Nest Home Design in California.
By Leah Hennen, FrontDoor.com
Ever walk into an open house or a model home and notice how… well, inhumanly perfect it looks? If so, chances are the property is “staged.”
In real estate parlance, that means the place has been dressed with paint, furniture arrangements, art and accessories carefully chosen to highlight the home’s strengths, downplay its weaknesses, and appeal to the greatest number of prospective buyers.
Whether you’re designing to sell or designing to dwell, here’s how the home-staging pros get that “I have to have it!” look. These tips and tricks can make your own humble abode look like a million bucks.
[metaslider id=2400]
Recommendation 2. Conquer clutter
Admit it: You have too much stuff. “The most important thing most people can do to improve their home is to clear out, clean up, and get rid of clutter,” says Lisa LaPorta, cast designer on HGTV’s hit show “Designed to Sell” and owner of Lisa LaPorta Design in Los Angeles.
Be ruthless as you go about purging your belongings. If you haven’t used it in three months, stagers say, box it up and store it away; if you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it. And make a house rule that for every new item that comes in, an old one has to leave. Any mixed feelings you have about tossing life’s accumulated detritus will quickly be replaced with a sense of relief and appreciation of your Zen-like new surroundings.
Sound daunting? Take it one room at a time. If your bookshelves are bursting at the seams, for instance, “clear them off and start over,” suggests Michelle Yackel, owner of Divine Redesigns in Atlanta. “It’s okay to have empty space around your books and knickknacks.” Inexpensive baskets make great hiding places for unsightly paperbacks, and add texture and visual interest. Books stacked vertically serve as pedestals to show off prized pottery or other objects d’art. You can even remove the dust covers from hardbacks and group them by color, turning a busy jumble into a decorative addition to the room.
If you simply can’t part with your collection of Architectural Digests or your kids won’t let you near the 300 carefully assembled Lego creations stacked on their dresser, it’s time to get creative about storage and organization. Retailers like the Container Store and Target sell handy rolling bins designed to slip under a bed and hide everything from household supplies to kids’ toys. And if you can’t get rid of it and can’t hide it, flaunt it with style: “Places like IKEA sell colorful and inexpensive fabric, cardboard, or melamine magazine holders. Lined up on a shelf, they look a lot cleaner than stacks of magazines everywhere and add a unified visual element to the room,” says Michael Friedes, owner of Nest Home Design in California.
By Leah Hennen, FrontDoor.com