The Three "R"s of Home Staging: Refreshing, Reducing and Rearranging

When selling your house you need to think about more than just tidying up and straightening out a few things if you want to sell your home quickly and get the most money from the sale. Hiring a Professional Home Stager to guide you through the process of “house sale preparation” is your best bet. Why? Because Home Stagers know what it is that will sell your home best, looking through the “buyer’s eye”. A Professional Home Stager, employing the Three “R”s of Home Staging: Refreshing, Reducing and Rearranging, will ensure that your house is “sale ready”.

Refreshing your house takes into consideration the total condition of your house. All the little repairs that you’ve been meaning to do for awhile, like repairing the dripping bathroom faucet or replacing the trim around the windows in the guest bedroom now need to be done. A Professional Home Stager will be able to tell you what repairs, or upgrades should be completed in order for your home to look renewed, refreshed and up-to-date and thus competitive in today’s real estate market. The most common upgrades include painting, replacing or shampooing carpeting and replacing/updating lighting. According to the 2007 HomeGain Survey, the ROI of these relatively easy upgrades yield between 150% to 355%.

Now that your home is refreshed from top to bottom and front to back, you need to look at all the things in your house that you have collected or acquired. Thinking about moving is a great time to seriously consider “reducing” stuff around. Do you need or want all the back issues of National Geographic from the past 15 years or the straggly plants on the living room window ledge? Cleaning out the closets and clearing off the bookshelves are soul-cleansing activities that may have far reaching consequences for your well-being as well as giving your house room to breathe. A Professional Home Stager will also tell you that “clearing the clutter” means that prospective buyers can actually see the “bones” of your house and not be distracted by all the “stuff”. Clear and simple!

The grand finale is part of the magic that comes with Professional Home Staging. This is the positioning or re-arranging of your furnishings and accessories in your house to create a lifestyle image that speaks to the prospective buyer, “Buy me!”. A Professional Home Stager knows how to highlight focal points in your house, be they a fireplace, a dramatic window or decorative mouldings. The positioning of furniture creates a flow throughout your house that leads the prospective buyer around noticing all that your house has to offer and encourages them to imagine themselves living in your house. Well placed accessories including artwork, lend to the ambiance that you want to create.

So if you follow the three “R”s of Home Staging, your house will be guaranteed to look it’s best for that special time when you decide to move on and let your house belong to someone else.