Tips for staging your home
Make your home warm and inviting and speed up its sale.
It’s difficult to get an objective view of your own home. You’ve been staring at its idiosyncrasies for years. So many issues have become unimportant as you’ve learnt to live with them, but they could be the very things that put a potential buyer off.
Start with a clean slate:
First things first. Each room must be spotless. Regardless of flaky paint or worn carpet, the windows and sill should be clean and the carpet cleaned also. The finest detail needs looking over, right down to dirty light switches and dust trapped in the heater grill.
Deodorise the curtains and do your best with the floors. Even old linoleum can be scrubbed and polished.
Get rid of your clutter:
A potential buyer needs to be able to picture themselves living in your house, which means removing your family photos, packing up your knick knacks and personal decorations.
That doesn’t mean leaving tables and mantelpieces bare, however. The experts suggest leaving three items of various heights on each surface. A plant, a lamp, a book. It helps create a greater sense of space. That doesn’t mean leaving spaces like the mantelpiece and coffee table barren. Scale back on your furniture: When a room is over-packed with furniture, it can appear smaller. Size matters, even in a small house so capitalise on every centimetre of floor space by creating a look of spaciousness. Make sure buyers appreciate the size of each room by removing one or two pieces of furniture.
Reconsider your furniture placement:
You can improve the general flow of your house by arranging the furniture so it guides rather than blocks movement from one room to another. For example, avoid presenting the backs of chairs and couches to full or first view. Don’t block windows or doorways with furniture, but create clear paths and easy access from one room to another, both visually and physically.
A professional trick is to create a focal point on the farthest wall from the doorway, then arrange the furniture in a triangle around that focal point.
For example in the living room the fireplace is usually the focal point and your chairs and sofa form a triangle in front of it. If you don’t have a fireplace, which is reasonably common since heat pumps took over the heating role, create another focal point such as interesting objects on a coffee table or a central painting that helps pull the room together. Colour will brighten your room: It’s a good idea to add a fresh coat of warm, neutral-colour paint in each room. Then accessorise using your best, least worn items. Keep it simple, make sure it all smells fresh and keep it bright with high wattage light bulbs, just for the duration.
Set the scene on open home day: Lay a fire in the fireplace, and set your dining table as if you are about to have a celebratory meal. Add flowers to the table or a centrepiece of brightcoloured fruit. You are calling on all the buyers’ senses and the olfactory is tickled by these, according to research.
Create other little settings on a coffee table, perhaps a chess game or two china cups and a fancy teapot. It all adds character and an expectation of what life could be like living here.
Look closely at the curtains in your home. If they are in bad repair, replace them with something neutral (and inexpensive). Consider removing or replacing net curtains. Are they really necessary or are they just reducing light into the room?
Make your bathroom feel luxurious by adding a new shower curtain or cleaning the shower glass meticulously. Add your best colour coordinated towels folded like motel towels with no end seams showing, and then add some fragrant soap. All your personal toiletry items should be out of sight, including the shampoo from the shower and toothbrushes etc. When the real estate photographs are taken, these items stick out like the proverbial. Add scented candles or a subtle air freshener.
If you have companion animals, clean their bedding frequently. Put it out of sight for the open home and spray a germicidal air freshener before each showing.
Make the first impression count. From the footpath, stand and look at your home with fresh eyes. Put some time aside to remove any dead plants, pull out all the weeds, and hide any empty pots etc in a back shed.
Mow the lawns and trim the edges. If the garden is non-existent, add some potted colour by the front door.
Make sure the front door and step are clean and the house is washed down. The windows should sparkle and the paths be swept clean. Consider spraying with a bleach solution to remove moss, mould and lichen.
Add a new doormat (you can take it with you when you leave).
First impressions are hugely important.
They say a house sells in the first four seconds of viewing and the initial assessment puts a bias on the rest of the visit, so start at the front entrance.