How to Prepare Your Home for Staging

To sell your home, you must do a significant amount of preparation to ensure each room is in stable condition. Before you take pictures of each room to post on Zillow or begin showing your home in person, you’ll want to be sure that it’s staged in the most presentable way possible. It needs to look its best to impress any potential buyers. 

Properly staging a home can help increase its value and decrease the amount of time it takes to sell the house. For these reasons alone, it can be beneficial for you to spend an adequate amount of time preparing your home for sale. All of your hard work and preparation in presenting your home will help potential buyers see themselves living there. Here are some tips on how to best stage your home when placing it on the market.

Staging is all about the buyer’s experience.

And you want that experience to be the best it possibly can be. In many ways, it’s similar to going to the movies. When you’re at a theater, you expect an incredible movie viewing experience as well as a clean and comfortable environment. Likewise, when people tour a home, they expect the place to look visually appealing and hope to establish whether they can imagine themselves living there. 

As you’re showing your home, keep this movie analogy in mind. You’ll not only want to make your house presentable but also create a welcoming and homey experience. Things like air fresheners, snacks, and drinks can help viewers feel more at home as soon as they step inside. 

If before a showing you need any of these items or other essentials, you can order them for delivery right to your door. There’s a lot on your plate when you’re selling a home, so why not make things easier on yourself by having any items you need for a showing sent straight to you? Opting for delivery means you don’t have to worry about restocking at the store and instead can direct your attention to impressing any potential buyer. 

Maintain the interior and exterior of your home.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that cleaning and decluttering your home before showings is a must. It’ll be challenging to sell any home that is covered in messes or appears out-of-order. When people view your home, you want to show that the property is well-maintained and taken care of. 

To do this, go through every room and make sure they are as clean as possible. Pick up and remove any clutter, wipe down surfaces, vacuum, and perform any other tasks required in a deep clean. By doing this before you begin showing your home, you can ensure that people will be impressed with the house’s cleanliness. 

You’ll also want to pay attention to the outside of your home. Curb appeal is important and is the first impression a potential buyer will have of the place. Keeping your gardens well-maintained and your lawn mowed will make your home look much more presentable and will certainly impress any buyer from the get-go. 

 

De-personalize each room

When people are viewing your home, the goal is for them to imagine themselves living there easily. If your shelves and walls are covered in personal items – like family pictures and diplomas  – this will be much harder for them to do. Takedown these highly personal things and replace them with generic artwork so that the house is still decorated but without the personal touches. 

You’ll want to ensure that other, less obvious personal items are also removed or put away. Keep clothing out-of-site as well as items in the bathroom, like toothbrushes, razors, etc. Not only does this invite the potential buyer to imagine the home as their own, but it also helps keep the clutter at bay. 

Open up space

It’s no secret that people generally prefer more space than less. Unless a potential buyer has a goal to downsize, they’re going to want a house with larger rooms and plenty of space. That way, they get more bang for their buck. As a result, it’s advantageous for you to do what you can to make your rooms appear larger and less cramped. How?

For starters, clear out any unnecessary furniture. While you might’ve loved having an extra lounging chair in your living room, it can make the room appear a lot smaller, or worse, cramped. By clearing some of this excess furniture, you can open up the rooms in your house, which will help the potential buyer imagine their own furniture arrangement. So, go through every room in your house and imagine how you can better arrange the furniture to give it this open and inviting atmosphere. Check out a list of ways you can make rooms look larger for other ideas to help reimagine spaces. 

Complete unfinished projects

We all have specific projects that we start, but we cannot finish due to unforeseen circumstances. If that’s the case for you when you’re getting ready to sell, you should see if it would be possible to complete them. For example, if you intended to paint a room or replace a damaged carpet, doing so before putting your house on the market could increase its value and likelihood of being sold. These unfinished projects can seem overwhelming for many potential buyers and perhaps more of a hassle to finish. Additionally, touching up the paint in certain areas can also give the house a more polished look.

Selling a home can be an exciting, albeit stressful, experience. Taking the initiative to prepare your home for sale properly can make the process smoother and more valuable for you. If you are selling your home, or are planning to in the future, hopefully, these tips can help you through the process.