When it comes to selling, one of the most important moments is when the prospective buyer sees your home in person. One study showed that 80 percent of buyers make their decision about a home as soon as they step inside. As with other things in life, first impressions matter!
DEPERSONALIZE
Everyone wants a house to feel like home. But buyers don’t want their new house to feel like it’s your home. When you’re staging your house to attract potential buyers, you want to do everything you can to make it easy for buyers to picture it as their home. That’s why depersonalizing your house is a key element of staging.
Professional wedding photos don’t necessarily need to be removed. However, that picture of your aunt’s husband’s second cousin’s graduation should probably go into storage until it’s time to move. Miscellaneous family pictures on the wall or on shelves are the best things to take down. A clean slate is generally the key to the imagination, which is what you want buyers to have. The imagination to make your house their home.
GO NEUTRAL
For the most part, when home buyers walk into your house, you want the surroundings to be neutral. You don’t want them to see painted orange walls, and zebra patterned couches. However, you don’t need to go extreme and make everything black. Staying with neutral colors like gray, white, black and occasional pops of yellow or blue will win most people without a doubt. Trendy patterns, such as houndstooth or chevron add a fantastic dimension to your decorations as long as they are modern and up-to-date.
BE BRIGHT
There’s generally nothing quite as depressing as walking into a dark house. After all, Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb for no reason! Adding more light fixtures or lamps solves the problem of darkness quickly. Take down any heavy curtains to let more natural light in. This is a very pleasant and cost-free way to brighten your house.
JUST KEEP CLEANING
We all know a good spring cleaning is an exciting way to spruce your house up. However, when it comes to house staging, a clean home is vital to attracting buyers. And a simple spring cleaning might not cut it. Every square inch of your house and every corner should be sparkling and shiny.
And after you’ve done all that work, it’s important you keep it that way. It’s great to clean your house really well. But if you want to sell your house, it should stay clean as long as buyers are coming to view it. One deep cleaning every one or two weeks, and then de-cluttering and sprucing up before every showing is the way to go. For an all-inclusive list, which will help you make sure you don’t miss anything, check out this cleaning article.
FOCUS ON MAIN LIVING AREAS
When your house is being viewed by buyers, they don’t necessarily care about how the storage closet is staged. They do, however, like to see main areas, like the kitchen, master bedroom, and living room staged nicely. Because we all know it’s easier to envision yourself living somewhere when you can imagine what it would look like.
When it comes time to stage your house, focus on making the main living areas presentable and neat. Let’s look at a few specific things you can do to spice up each individual room.
KITCHEN AND DINING ROOM
For most, the kitchen is the heart of the home. Along with the dining room, it’s the place where the family eats meals together and where good conversations happen. So what can you do to add some extra appeal to these rooms? First, add stainless steel appliances! Stainless steel appliances are super trendy right now, and furthermore, everyone loves a shiny new refrigerator.
Secondly, if you have dated painted cabinets that are looking rough, there’s a solution! Staining your cabinets will give your kitchen a whole new look. Read this article to learn how you can stain your cabinets on your own. New appliances and freshly stained cabinets will give your kitchen all the good looks it needs.
MASTER BEDROOM
The most important thing about the master bedroom is to make it look like a happy place to be. Dark colors are not usually very attractive. Paint the walls a light gray or off-white, and add some trendy pieces of furniture or decorations.
LIVING ROOM
Next in line is the living room. Generally, we eat in the dining room, sit on the couches in the living room, and repeat. So it’s important to have the living room looking like it’s ready to invite you to stay. As we mentioned with the master bedroom, going with light colors, and a few pieces of furniture will make it a lovely place. A leather couch, desk, and soft rug are just right for the base decorations in your living room.
BE CREATIVE
If you want your home to sell, there are two important things to keep in mind. Creativeness, and willingness to work. Houses don’t generally stage themselves after all. Therefore, the faster you get started the faster you’ll be done.
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