Articles on home staging or how to decorate a house to sell quickly in a slow real estate market often focus on de-cluttering and neutralizing (unfortunately, often to the point of blandness). There is also much talk of the importance of kitchens and bathrooms, but bedrooms are important too.

The right touches can take a sad room that would never stick in a buyers mind to one that is memorable and says “wow!’

Staging Diva Graduate Jayne Steuart of Colorado-based Pearl Home Staging and Redesign LLC really shows us how it’s done in this transformation of a 13 x 14 foot extra bedroom.

Before Jayne transformed this space the placement of the bed was awkward and made the room look small. The focal point was also the unattractive window.

Jayne moved the bed to go under the window to refocus and re-balance the room. At the same time she dressed both to create a relaxing and stylish haven.

Her use of muted tones and well chosen accessories create a lush environment that make the room look larger and far more elegant. I love how she handled the window. Now it looks much larger because the soft chenille panels and silky sheers are hung close to the ceiling. This is a great trick to make ceilings also appear higher, one of the many I share in the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans.

Some home sellers worry about the cost of staging, reluctant to invest in a home they’re selling. This is short-sighted because selling an unappealing property costs the seller more in lost time and lower offers, than would dressing it up to appeal to buyers and attracting higher offers sooner.

It’s interesting to note that Jayne Steuart staged this bedroom with furniture the home seller already had in other rooms. The new bedding and window treatments can be used in the sellers new home, so purchasing these items was not a waste. They serve the important purpose of letting the home show well on the real estate market with the added bonus that the owners will live in much better style in their new abode.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love. There are over 4000 Staging Diva students around the world.

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I’ve heard people suggest home staging is actually a deceitful practice because it is meant to disguise real problems, but this is not the case.  Home staging is about letting a home’s best features shine through, not hiding serious problems that need to be addressed.

The entrance of this home says “fixer-upper” because of all the junk on the porch, overgrown hedge and peeling paint. But it’s actually a sound property that just needs some care to change the first impression from “fixer upper” to “welcome home.”

However, there are instances where home staging is sought after as a band-aid solution for much larger issues.

With certain properties it makes more sense for the owners to invest in repairs before staging and “home staging with integrity” means that the stager will point this out.

When a home is a true fixer-upper and has a long list of structural issues and obvious defects, no amount of paint or new furniture will disguise the problems.

If you’re asked to stage such a home, suggest that the owners fix what’s wrong before having it staged because any problems will be revealed in the home inspection anyway.

There’s a big difference between patching up cracked plaster and repainting after a leaky roof has been fixed, and doing the same to hide the fact that it’s leaking.

The roof issues will be uncovered in a home inspection so the home seller will be no further ahead, and may in fact watch their deal fall apart when it could have gone through had they addressed the issue in the first place.

As a stager, you should emphasize the need to fix the leak and why, and suggest once that’s done that the wall be repaired and painted. You’ll of course be picking the color, but that does not remove the responsibility of pointing out the steps that need to happen before any paint goes on the wall.

I once refused to stage a dilapidated house that had sat on the market for months without an offer. Instead of calling me, the vendor really should have called a contractor first.

I advised the client to either drop his price significantly and sell the home as a ‘tear down’ for land value, or to take it off the market during the summer, repair all the problems and then call me to stage it for the fall real estate market.

As a professional stager, you don’t want your home staging business associated with problem properties masquerading in nice paint and furniture.

There are plenty of solid houses crying out for cosmetic changes that can make all the difference in a real estate sale. Let your talents as a home stager shine on these. Don’t waste your time or reputation staging obvious tear downs, instead keep marketing your business and more clients will follow!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

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When you’re staging a home, don’t neglect the hallways of a home because they’re the paths that lead people through the house. It’s also a great opportunity to leave a strong impression with prospective buyers because most people don’t bother doing anything with the hall before they sell.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you’re staging the hallway of a property:

• Hallways usually take a lot of abuse so they usually need repainting.
• Long, dark hallways can always use better lighting.
• Remove all clutter.
• Add a table and floral arrangement if you have space at the end of a long hallway and a piece of art to serve as a focal point.

Whether you’re dealing with a garage, basement, attic, laundry room or hallway, remember it’s your job to romance the buyer and you must be doing this throughout the home.

If they’ve seen a dozen houses with horrible garages or creepy old basements, these might be the spaces the buyer is putting a great deal of importance on. Help your clients sell fast and for more money by being the stager who takes care with these less glamorous, but equally as important, spaces in a home.

For more home staging design tips, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. It’s sure to be a great source of design inspiration (and direction) for your future home staging projects.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

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When staging a house to sell, you can’t just ignore a room because it presents a staging challenge, or because you don’t think it would be as important as staging the kitchen or bathroom.

The goal of home staging is to have a buyer make a strong emotional connection with a property and who’s to say their dream is to have a study in the attic or a craft room in the basement?

Your job is to make the property you’ve been hired to stage appeal to as many people as possible. This means you have to pay careful attention to every room of a house because you can’t assume nobody will care what the basement, attic or garage looks like.

In a series of blog posts, I’ve been sharing tips for staging different spaces in a home that are often neglected; the garage, the basement, the laundry room and today I’ll cover the attic.

If you have a usable attic to work with when you’re staging a house, show buyers how much storage they’ll have when they buy the property. Don’t let the homeowners cram all of their stuff up there to hide it while the house is on the market. Have them move their things into storage or donate unused items to charity instead.

• Get piles of stuff off the floor and tucked away neatly in closets and cupboards.
• Repaint the walls if needed.
• If there’s a dusty old carpet on the floor, suggest replacing it with laminate.
• Add lighting so it’s as bright as possible.

All of these things will go a long way towards creating an attractive usable space in the attic.

Do you have an attic home staging story you’d like to share? Please add a comment below and contribute to the discussion!

If you’d like more home staging design tips, you should check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. It covers every single space of a home and offers advice along with my own before and after photos and floor plans for reference.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, home staging tips, how to stage an attic, debra gould, home staging training, staging diva

When it comes to rooms that are often forgotten in home staging, the laundry room often makes the list. After all, it’s a laundry room. How good can it get?

As I’ve mentioned in my posts about staging the garage and the basement, it’s important to remember that home staging is all about romancing a perspective buyer.

If the laundry area is in the dark corner of an unfinished basement, a buyer might think, “I have to do two loads a day, and I’m supposed to do it in this creepy space? Forget it!” However, if the laundry room is bright and beautiful, the same buyer might think (about the exact same space), “What a great laundry room! I might even spend time in here when there’s no laundry to do!”

You don’t have to go crazy with the design of the laundry room – keep it minimalist. It should be brightly lit, clean and functional.

• Brighten the space up with a coat of paint and some new lighting.
• Put detergent and other laundering supplies in cupboards.
• If there’s a window with a drab view, hide it with a curtain or a nice blind.
• All you should be left with is the washer and dryer, an ironing board and an attractive laundry basket.

In my next post I’ll give you some home staging tips for another often missed room of a house in home staging – the attic. By the way, I cover all these rooms and more in the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, home staging tips, how to stage a laundry room, debra gould, home staging training, staging diva

Certain areas of a home are more likely than others to be forgotten when it comes to staging a property to sell. However these spaces, which seem unimportant to some homeowners (or even some home stagers), might actually rank higher than expected on a prospective buyer’s house wish list.

In a post on Monday I gave tips for staging the garage. Today, my focus is on an equally important selling feature of a home:

The Basement. You never know what a prospective buyer may have planned for the basement of a property you’re staging. If the homeowners are using their basement primarily for storage, make sure everything is in order so a buyer can perceive it as a great, usable space.

The basement should never be kept looking like a dumping ground when a house goes up for sale.

• Put up shelves to get as much clutter off the floor as you can. Have your clients donate or sell anything they don’t want to move and suggest they put other large items into storage that they’ll be taking with them to their new home.
• If the walls and floor are dingy, give them a fresh coat of paint.
• Install better lighting if needed.
• Put up blinds to hide ugly views from basement windows.
• In a finished basement, help buyers envision a use for the space by adding props such as a craft table or workout equipment. Add accessories such as plants, art and lamps to give the space warmth.

On Friday I’ll post tips on how to stage a laundry room to sell. In the meantime, if you found this advice useful and haven’t already read Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans, you should get yourself a copy. It’s full of this same type of home staging advice and covers every nook and cranny of a property.

If you have a basement home staging story to share I’d love to read it! Please share it here by leaving a comment below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, home staging tips, how to stage a basement, debra gould, home staging training, staging diva

You know that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore other parts of a house when it comes to staging it to sell.

In a series of blog posts, I’ll outline the five most neglected parts of a property when it comes to staging, and how you can stage them properly for your clients.

I’m going to start with one of the biggest selling features of a home:

The Garage. Many homeowners think they can simply close the garage door when they put their house on the market and hope that potential buyers won’t notice the clutter or hope they will forgive the mess. But, because home staging is about helping a buyer make an emotional connection to a home, you can’t allow your clients to take lazy shortcuts and hope for the best.

A garage can be a huge selling feature of a property but most garages are kept in a constant state of disorder. Because your goal as a home stager is to have a buyer imagine their life in a home, you can’t ask them to see past clutter because many won’t be able to.

• The first step for staging a garage is to remove all clutter. Help the homeowners to purge and ask them to get rid of anything that doesn’t have to be there. Advise them to donate unwanted items to charity and put any seasonal items they won’t use while the house is listed should be put in storage.
• For items that do need to be kept, put a pegboard up to get tools off of surfaces and make sure there are no piles of clutter on the floor.
• The homeowners can keep their lawnmower, bicycles and paint cans in the garage but make sure they’re organized.
• If it’s been awhile since the garage saw a fresh coat of paint, now’s the time to freshen it up – that goes for walls and the floor. (For tips on how to choose paint colors for the garage, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide.)

On Wednesday I’ll talk about how to stage a basement to sell. If you don’t want to wait, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. It teaches you how to stage every space in a home and it contains tons of photographs from my own home staging projects and even floor plans to help give you some inspiration.

If you have any garage staging stories, please share them by leaving a comment below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, home staging tips, how to stage a garage, debra gould, home staging training, staging diva

On Friday I shared two of my top five staging tips in a blog post you can read here. They included paying attention to curb appeal and and de-cluttering.

Here are my remaining top three:

3. Avoid wandering eyes
You want to make sure there are no little problems in a room that will have a potential buyer looking from one flaw to another thinking about they work they’ll have to do. You want them to see the bigger picture and imagine themselves living there.

For example, do a walkthrough and look for chipped paint on the door frames. These can be filled in with “white out”.  Old nail holes can often be hidden behind strategically hung art, but don’t just throw things on the wall where the old nail was (see point 5).

Peeling wallpaper should be glued back down. Make sure there are covers on all electrical outlets and light switches, and replace any that are cracked. These little things make a big difference!

4. Color is your friend when it’s time to sell a house
If you have to repaint a home’s interior, or some rooms in a home, try to choose a pleasing color palette that allows each room to flow nicely into the next. All colors should go together. Try to repeat one signature color throughout a home. Maybe it’s the feature color in one room used as an accent in the others, through accessories or throw cushions.

5. Make a big impact with a little art
By strategically using art, you can enhance a home’s perceived value, draw the eye away from tiny flaws, give an otherwise uninteresting space a focal point and replace personal memorabilia.

Position art at eye level and use pieces that are appropriate to the size of the wall. Art with a large frame on a small wall can make the entire area seem smaller. Avoid religious art, or anything edgy that could be offensive to some potential buyers. (For more tips about using art for home staging, visit the Staging Diva Art Shop.)

These are only five of dozens of tips that can improve your next home staging project. Check out Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans – an essential guide for every home stager. It’s full of home staging design tips and tricks (as the title suggests) and they’re all brought to life with before and after photos and sample floor plans from my own home staging projects.

I hope these tips will help you get your next client’s home sold faster for more money!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Home Staging expert Debra Gould also known as The Staging Diva has taught over 1000 men and women how to make money as a home stager. She is president of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company that is frequently profiled in the media in both the US and Canada. Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging, real estate enhancement businesses.

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There are so many small things home stagers can do to a property that will dramatically shorten the time it spends on the real estate market while increasing the final sales price for home sellers.

Here are the first of my five favorite home staging tips, so you can help each property you stage sell faster and for more money (the rest will be published on Monday):

1. Reduce drive-bys
Imagine you’re on a home hunting mission. Your real estate agent has ten properties to show you on a Saturday afternoon. When you drive up to what could be your dream home, you see a rusted-out mailbox, broken handrail and children’s toys strewn across the lawn which hasn’t seen a lawn mower in weeks. You’re probably going to say, “Um, no thanks, let’s move on.”

Curb appeal is so important. If the outside of a house looks unkempt, a potential buyer is going to think nobody cares about it.

You should make sure, no matter what, that lawns are freshly cut, leaves are raked or snow shoveled from the driveway.

A potted or hanging plant can make a big difference near the entrance.

Repair or replace any obvious defects, often this is cheaper to do than a prospective buyer will imagine.

Make sure the walk ways and porches are swept clean and garbage and recycling containers are tucked away at the rear of the house or in the garage.

Make sure the exterior gets a good pressure wash and the decks are scrubbed clean. It’s a good alternative to painting and once everything’s clean you might see it doesn’t need to be repainted at all – perhaps just a touch up will do.

2. One man’s junk is not necessarily another man’s treasure, it may be their reason not to buy the house
De-cluttering is essential. Tackle one area at a time so the task isn’t so overwhelming. If you’re doing this with your client, make sure they look at each item carefully before deciding whether it’s to keep or to toss.

Each closet will probably have to be gone through more than once to get its contents down to the absolute essentials, but it will be worth it.

If the home owner is having a tough time parting with things, recommend they rent a storage locker so they can keep their beloved items, just remove them from the house they’re selling. They’ll have to move it eventually anyway!

I’ll be adding three more tips in a blog post on Monday so be sure to look for it!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Home Staging expert Debra Gould also known as The Staging Diva has taught over 1000 men and women how to make money as a home stager. She is president of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company that is frequently profiled in the media in both the US and Canada. Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging, real estate enhancement businesses.

Technorati Tags: home stager, home staging, home stager marketing, home staging business, house fluffing, real estate staging, house staging, property styling, real estate market, real estate enhancement, Staging Diva, Debra Gould, home staging training, home staging tips, home staging business training