Staging your home is one of the best way to sell your house as fast and for the most amount of money. I have been to a few listing presentations where the sellers tells me that some other realtor thought the house was good enough. Well, good enough is not what I want. I want your house to sell for the full price and I want you to move on with your life fast. The person who will buy your house must feel like he/she just walked in their new home. This is the feeling I am going for.
Here is some really good advice:
I have an approach that will work for every room of the house; you just need to go over it for each room. IMPORTANT – You look at each room from top to button, let’s start from the left and move to the right. Don’t look at the room as a whole, you need to methodically go over everything. The technique should be the same for every room:
1- Tabula Rasa. I am going Latin here, but what I want you to do is to remove every object that is not a furniture or a fixture. Let me look at my kitchen and I let you know what I can do here. From top to button: remove bottles on top of refrigerator and beautiful plant on cabinet. Remove magnet and my nieces drawing from refrigerator, plant on top of counter. Remove my personal pictures from the wall. Remove knives, cutting board, plant, coffee maker, coffee cups, small oven, paper towel, bottle of wine, cookies and basket of fruit from counters. Wow, I never noticed I had so much.
When you remove things from counters or furniture, you may not know where to put them. You may need to box them. Do 3 boxes:
1. Toss
2. Storage
3. Sell.
You also may need to rent a storage unit for the time of the listing. I don’t want your boxes in the garage. Many people look at the garage and if cluttered may not imagine where they can put their cars and how much space there is for them to do projects.
2- Clean and repair. I have granite in my kitchen and this is a good time to make it shine. Buy some good products and clean everything from top to button. Starting from light fixtures to the top of the refrigerator (I am too short to see it, but there may be some taller people coming to see my house). Pay particular attention to the sink, that I want spotless, open the oven and clean it (some ovens cleans themselves), open the refrigerator and toss everything that is old and clean it. Make somebody clean the garbage can and wash it. I want no smell coming out of any part of your kitchen. Wash the floor. Repair leaking sinks, replace non working light bulbs, and retouch paint if necessary. Don’t do big repairs, just small touches.
3- Put some love back. Now that is empty and clean chose a couple of pieces to put back. Mainly flowers and plants and for the kitchen a (1) nice piece such as a nice espresso machine. In the kitchen nothing goes on cabinets.
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