How to Stage Your Home For a Sale
There’s an art to making your home look good before a sale, and we can help with useful tips we’ve gathered from experience. Whether it’s cleaning up the curb with a pressure washer or how you style your furniture, you want your home to look its absolute best.
Start With the Curb
Rent a pressure washer to remove dirt and grime from your siding, roof, fascia and gutters. Paint the front door and/or shutters a bright color, but make sure it coordinates well with the rest of the home’s colors. Replace old house numbers, lighting, the mailbox and welcome mat. Clean up the edging around flower beds and lay down fresh mulch. Fill in empty beds with small shrubs, seasonal flowers and greenery. Even if it’s the dead of winter, get a pair of urns or large planters and fill them with small evergreen shrubs and cold-hardy annuals. If you have window boxes, fill them with fresh greenery too. If your porch or stoop has room for furniture, add a couple of chairs to expand your outdoor living space.
Minimize Decor During the Holidays
When selling your home during the holiday season, remember the less-is-more mantra of home staging. You don’t have to forgo the decorations but keep them to a cohesive minimum. Keep your holiday tree subtle with decorations that match your decor. For instance, if your living room is painted a soothing ocean-blue hue, skip the clashing red garland and opt for white snowflakes or a silver glass-ball wreath. If you’ve got an earthy color scheme, accent with rich tones like cranberries, forest greens and gold.
Too many trimmings may distract buyers, but the right accessories can accentuate your home’s best features. Dangle mistletoe in an arched doorway, wrap a little garland around the staircase banister, display a menorah in a bay window and hang a couple of stockings from the fireplace mantel. Also, skip overtly religious displays because they may be off-putting to some buyers — you want to keep neutrality throughout. On your home’s exterior, forgo the large inflatables and instead, use simple string lighting to play up your home’s architecture or draw attention to the gorgeous fir tree in your front yard.
Furniture Placement
There’s a common belief that rooms will feel larger if all the furniture is pushed against the walls, but that isn’t the case. Instead, furnish your space by floating furniture away from walls. Reposition sofas and chairs into cozy conversational groups, and place pieces so that the traffic flow in a room is obvious. Not only will this make the space more user-friendly, but it will open up the room and make it seem larger.
