Moving 101: Tips for Staging your Home to Sell

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Selling your home or consider doing so in the near future? Now is the time to break out the paintbrush, dust cloth and get follow these tips to staging your home to sell. Work to make your space appealing to the potential new home owners with neutral colors, smart staging and a decluttered look. Check out these tips to staging your home to sell and feel free to leave your tips in the comments!

As we just shared, we bought a new house! But what I haven’t talked about much is that we sold our other house very quickly! Like most home owners, I thought our house was nicely decorated and arranged but it never hurts to do a little touch ups or decluttering when putting it up on the market. I firmly believe that between our minimalist staging approach, our beautiful professional staging photos (not seen in this post!) and our realtor’s quick responses, we were able to nail down a seller within 6 days after a bidding war!

Once reading through my post I’d love if you’d leave a comment with more tips on staging your home to sell if you don’t see something I’ve listed!

• Move extra furniture off site. The number one advice I can give it to rent a storage space or find a nice family member (my father-in-law!) who will let you store stuff during the staging process. Making your house look spacious and not cluttered is KEY so an off-site location is best for all the extra items you’ve collected over the years without feeling like you have to throw everything out. Yes it’s an extra step as you’ll eventually need to move those things back with you to the new space, but it’s worth it!
• Be creative in what you do hide in your home. People will probably open your kitchen cabinets, pantry doors, closets and bathroom cabinets but it’s unlikely they’ll be opening your dining room sideboard, bedroom dresser drawers or living room entertainment unit. We moved the girls’ toy storage unit off site during the staging season, but used our entertainment unit to hide a few key games and toys they could still access during that limited staging month.

• Depersonalize your home. Remove anything that includes your family’s photos or names from your walls and table tops. Picture frames, personal artwork, and stencils should removed from the walls as well. You’re trying to make your home look bigger and that’s done with the “less is more” approach.
• Get rid of clutter. Clean up your shelves to remove all those little knick knacks from your travels and big bulky items you put there as they didn’t have a home otherwise.
• Empty the closets, especially the bottoms. You might be tempted to take the earlier tips to heart and want to hide all these personalized items by stuffing them into a closet, but know that potential buyers WILL open your closets. You don’t want it to look like you don’t have much storage space and making the closets look more empty is a great way to show space.

• Use a neutral color palette. Not everyone will love the red walls in the dining room or that bright purple accent wall you added to your daughter’s bedroom so grab a paintbrush and give the walls a nice neutral coat.
• Remove or disengage childproof items. Potential now home owners may not have kids or that might not be something they’re focused on just yet. Let them see the house with all the obstacles of unlocking/latching/clicking all the booby traps you set.
• Remove the leaf from your dining room table. And if you have it set for 6 seats, make it 4. Our “dining room” is a bit tight so this helped to make it look more spacious to buyers.

• Clean up the landscape. Keeping up the front outside appearance is just as important as keeping it looking presentable inside! It’s the first thing people see when they walk up when coming inside and what they see when they drive by to scope out of the place. Make sure you keep your grass short, weed and keep up the front yard once you put it up for sale. I work from home and sit by that window most of my working day so I can promise you, you will have people slowing down as they do a drive by to see your home.
• Dust all the furniture. Give it a good shine!
• Clean all the windows, from the inside and out. Let the light shine in! It makes a great impression!

Look for an upcoming post on last minute checklist to get your home open house ready. This includes things like opening all the curtains, turning on the lights and getting rid of your bathroom mats!