How to Stage a Home with Confidence 

Buyer Appeal is your Main Priority

Almost every home, condo or apartment can benefit from staging. The goal of home staging is to create a mood that buyers can emotionally respond to. Every house can look better with carefully placed plants, flower arrangements, updated lighting & appliances, less clutter, and less personalized statements and images. The potential buyer wants to walk into a house and see himself or herself – not the current family in a picture perfect frame in each room. No house is perfect – but staging works to help overcome any imperfections your house may have.

Catch the Buyers’ Attention with your Home Staging Efforts

Like anything else in this world, you have only a few second to catch someone’s attention. For an advertisement, it’s about 3 seconds, for most buyers it’s 7 seconds after stepping over your home’s threshold. Over 95% of buyers agents say that home staging has some effect on the buyers’ opinion of your home and 32% of buyers’ agents believe staged homes increase the dollar value buyers are willing to offer by one to five percent.

HGTV gives you 30 can’t miss home staging ideas to help your moving efforts.

Staging a home isn’t an option; it’s a requirement these days. With good staging, buyers will recognize how your home could be their new home. By following a few useful tips and tricks of the trade you can stage your home in an effective way that showcases the best assets of the house, impresses buyers and sells promptly. With bad staging, your home could be left languishing on the market for much longer than you’d like.

Keep Your Budget in Mind to Avoid Over-Staging

When staging your house, there are rooms that can yield more benefit than others. In addition to the ever-effective curb appeal updates such as mulch, new shrubs, and simple decorating tips, we have focused on the 3 most important rooms of the house: living room, master bedroom, and kitchen.

Houzz lends 21 staging tips to help you sell your home.

Did these tips help you learn how to stage a home? Go through your home and determine what is a high priority. These home staging tips should help you save money, make your home more appealing to prospective buyers and help it sell more quickly and at a potentially higher price than an empty, white-walled or over-cluttered house.

How to Stage a Home Infographic:

Take a look at this infographic that sums up all you need to consider when staging your home. It’s perfect to pin to Pinterest and to keep referring back to.

For more home staging tips and moving tips look to these categories on Stagetecture.

Are your furnishings sabotaging your home-selling efforts? Before lowering the price of your home, you should evaluate whether improper (or no) staging could be turning prospective buyers off. In a 2010 study by the Real Estate Staging Association, homes that were staged spent an average of 67% less time on the market than unstaged homes. Whether your home is vacant and decorated with little more than a “for sale” sign or is occupied, try these 5 staging secrets for an edge over the competition:

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1. Get Inspired

While hiring a professional has generally proven to have a good return on investment (586% according to one report by HomeGain), cash-strapped sellers may not be able to make that initial investment. To get educated and inspired for ways to stage a home yourself, visit other staged homes during open houses (often higher-priced homes will have professional staging) or even furniture stores for ideas on room arrangement and modern decorating. Actually visiting the space will give you a better sense of the impact good staging has, but articles and photographs can provide helpful insight as well.

2. Make It Their Home By Clearing Personal Clutter

Homebuyers have a hard time envisioning the potential of a space, and it gets even more difficult when the home has overwhelming evidence of other inhabitants. If you only do one thing while preparing your home, get rid of any clutter or personal artifacts. That means family photographs and sentimental knickknacks in living spaces, appliances on kitchen countertops, and bathroom toiletries, for a start. Don’t forget about closets and garages, where extra space is a big selling point. By creating a more “generic” environment, buyers can better visualize the home’s potential for their own use.

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3. Bathroom Upgrade on a Budget

You don’t have to break the bank to give your bathroom new life. Rather than replacing those outdated-looking tiles, consider having them professionally painted, which can be more cost-efficient than a total redo. Dull and grimy faucets and other fixtures instantly grab attention, so be sure to give these a thorough cleaning and polishing. If they are decades old, consider upgrading them to sleek, modern fixtures — many are less than $100. Make small bathrooms appear larger by replacing a bulky vanity with a classy pedestal sink (these can be purchased for under $200). If storage is an issue, consider an over-the-toilet cabinet to nip those concerns in the bud.

4. Set the Mood with Light and Texture

Give instant warmth and appeal using visual elements like light, fabrics, and color. Make living spaces feel more inviting and warm with lamps, which can be found in garage sales and upgraded inexpensively with modern lampshades. Since color can be overwhelming, it’s best to paint the walls in warm, neutral tones and add pops of color with subtle decorative elements. Throw pillows and window treatments provide a great medium for adding color, while providing a visually soft and homey texture. For contrast, add flower arrangements, wooden bowls, and other classy decorative elements that will heighten your home’s visual appeal.

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5. Smell Sells

It’s a well-known fact that smell evokes strong emotional reactions and is tied to memories. Smells of mildew, smoke, animals, or even bleach could put your visitors in a negative mood the moment they walk in the door, putting your home at an immediate disadvantage. Conversely, smells of fresh baked cookies or bread can have strong positive influence on visitors. To give your home the best scent edge, tackle any issues that could be causing odor — dirty carpet that needs to be shampooed, pets that need to stay with a friend for awhile…you get the idea. Then, keep a stock of “comfort treats” — rolls, cookies, etc. — in the freezer so you can pop them in with little notice or cleanup. Alternatively, you can use candles or oils to scent your home, just keep it light and general (like vanilla)to avoid overwhelming potential buyers.

After only two years as a realtor at Smith Mountain Lake, Paul Moore achieved the Diamond Award, the highest sales level for a Roanoke Valley/Smith Mountain Lake VA realty agent. Through applying principles of direct response marketing and Internet technology, his Smith Mountain Homes Team has sold tens of millions of dollars of SML real estate and has continued to expand during a generally contracting market of the past several years.

For more home staging ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

Potential buyers love to open doors and look in cabinets when viewing a house.  What will they see when they look in your closets?  Open your closet doors and take a fresh unbiased look at them.  Consider what you might say if you were viewing your closets for the first time.  Would you think “this is a great closet”, or would you think “there’s no way this will work for me”.  If your closets won’t wow your potential buyer, there some simple inexpensive ways to make your closets much more appealing and hopefully help you sell your house.

Image via: House to Home

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Purge and Organize

Whatever the size of your closet, it is probably a bit overcrowded and perhaps disorganized.  The simplest method of improving any closet for potential buyers is to purge and organize.  If your closet looks packed and there is no space to put one more item, it will give potential buyers the feeling that the closets in your home are too small.  If you organize the closet and pull excess items out so that there is plenty of room, it will make the closet immediately seem roomier and feel larger.  A potential buyer will get the feel that there is plenty of room for their things.

Make sure that everything on the shelves is organized, folded and neat.  If you have smaller items, place them in plastic bins and stack the bins up on the shelves instead of having items falling all over each other.  If you have an extensive shoe collection that is overpowering your closet, consider boxing some of them up now so that they do not take up all the floor space.  Consider adding shoe bags that will hold many pairs of shoes and get them off the floor.  Shoe boxes that are neatly stacked on shelves or the floor are good as long as they are neat and organized.

Create a welcoming closet

Be sure to paint and clean the interior of the closet and if lighting is poor get some LED battery operated lights to brighten the space. Nothing is worse than a dark, dingy closet.  Be sure to add an air freshener to your closet to kill any unpleasant odors that might linger.  If you tend to keep laundry in the closet, move everything to the laundry room while you are trying to sell your home.  No one likes to look at other people’s dirty laundry.

Do you have sliding doors that don’t slide or come off their track?  Nothing turns off a potential buyer more that this. It’s definitely worth making the small investment to replace them. It will make a huge impact to potential buyers.

Image via: iheart Organizing

Install a closet organizer

And ultimately if you want to really help your house sell consider adding that closet organizer you just never got around to installing.  You may not be able to enjoy it long but it may just be that added incentive to your potential buyer to select your house over the one down the street.  There are never more wows that are heard when a potential candidate opens a closet door and sees a beautiful organized closet.  It is always a first on the list of plusses for any potential home buyer.

Image courtesy of Closet Factory

Kay Wade is Vice President of Design with Closet Factory’s corporate headquarters for over 15 years, Kay Wade has developed new, exciting and innovative product lines including custom closets, home office, media rooms, laundry and even a new custom garage collection.

For more closet ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

It’s hard to believe that 50 years ago, bigger was better and more popular. Larger homes, cars, everyone wanted to bigger, because they assumed it was better. As the years have gone on, the reality is that our world is over populated, the environment is in crisis, and smaller is becoming the new home trend.

Today, my Guest Blogger, The Tapco Group shows how smaller homes don’t mean scrimping on style. While homes may be getting smaller, homeowners still love comfortability and beautiful design style!

A Sizable Home Trend

Wanting it All: Smaller Footprints & Bigger Style 

 Some may call it the ‘the incredible shrinking home’ or the apparent demise of the McMansion. Statistics show that American homes are decreasing in size, down to their lowest level since 2004. Even with less living space, you want to live in a beautiful, comfortable home remains alive and strong.

While economic uncertainty has driven home-size preferences, urges to live sustainably, to live in or near cities and to have smaller heating and cooling bills all play significant roles in the smaller-home trend.

Larger homes, especially for empty-nesters or small families, can have rooms that are almost never used. Some building industry professionals cite that a room utilized less than 30 % of the time is unnecessary.

According to the Census Bureau, the average size of U.S. single-family homes completed in the fourth quarter of 2009 was 2,327 sq. ft., compared to 2,561 sq. ft. at the beginning of 2009. The last time this figure was below 2,400 sq. ft. was six years ago. A 2009 National Association of Home Builders survey also found that 9 in 10 builders were building or planning smaller homes.

“A personalized, comfortable home is more important than ever, especially those of us interested in downsizing from a larger home or building a right-size home to suit all our needs,” said Jonathan Wierengo, director of marketing for The Tapco Group^®. “Distinctive appeal is a large focus for these homeowners. With exterior products such as Atlantic Premium Shutters^® and The Foundry^® Specialty Siding, we’re always looking for ways that you can utilize brilliant, uncommon color and customizable accents to deliver the unique touch that defines ‘home’.”

According to an NAHB survey, 91% of respondents want an energy efficient home. Along with such practical features, we all still want appeal and creature comforts, such as the 65% desiring a front porch. The Tapco Group’s Jonathan Wierengo offers this advice for personalizing efficient, smaller-footprint homes with standout style.

Accentuate standard features

Surround windows and doors with functional accessories and design details. Window headers, shutters and door surrounds deliver vibrancy and elegance. Atlantic Premium Shutters complement virtually any window, from arch-top windows to customized small, fixed windows. The shutters feature enhanced dimension with fully functioning hardware. They can also be customized with cut-out shapes or color-matching finishes for the ultimate personal touch. We also offer a line of storm-rated shutters.

Turn an afterthought into an eye-catcher

Roof gables can become a canvas. They can highlight a small fraction of gable areas or whole gables with contrasting dimension that breathes life into exteriors. Foundry Siding’s variety of premium vinyl Shakes, Shingles and Shapes are available in dozens of bold colors. Unique Weathered Collection colors feature a versatile range of hues that dramatically evokes the look of time-tested, weathered cedar.

With easy-installing, long-lasting accessories such as these, smaller-footprint homes gain low-maintenance curb appeal and measurable distinction.

Atlantic Premium Shutters and The Foundry are divisions of The Tapco Group, a U.S. Green Building Council Member. For more information, visit The Tapco Group,  and follow us on Twitter – @Tapcogroup.

The Tapco Group is the building industry’s leading provider of easy to install, premium innovative interior and exterior products. Serving the building industry since 1961, Tapco specializes in the manufacturing of stone veneer, roofing, siding, trim, tool systems, egress systems and siding components. The products combine versatile application, durability, vast color palettes and uncommon authenticity to exceed the expectations of contractors and homeowners. Tapco delivers Innovation Born from Original Thinking.

For more small home living ideas on Stagetecture click here.