Staging Your Home For Sale – Come in! Come in! What’s Behind Your Front Door?

Knowing what you want is more than half of any battle – and you know you want to sell your house. Congratulations, you decisive person, you! Now what? Let’s walk in your front door and start staging your house to sell quickly.

1. Look up. Let there be light! This is no time to close the curtains and protect furniture from the effects of sunshine. Open up your curtains and take advantage of all the natural lighting you have! If you don’t have the advantage of natural light, be sure your foyer is well lit artificially. A dark entryway is a bad beginning. Think of all the scary movies you’ve seen in your lifetime.

2. Look down. Steam clean your carpets, buff your wood floors – take the extra deep cleaning step required to bring out the natural luster of your flooring. And for extra points, have guests take their shoes off by the front door. Not only will freshly cleaned floors stay cleaner longer, but you’ll be labeled a fastidious housekeeper, which is not a bad label for a motivated seller. Imagine the REALTOR® murmuring in hushed tones, “I don’t think they’ve ever walked on that carpet, do you?”

3. Look all around. Minimally accessorize. Choose a larger, dynamic object d’art rather than than a coffee table full of knick knacks. De-clutter as much as possible. As you stage your house for sale, always leave space for your potential buyer’s imagination.

4. Put away the family photographs. Yes, they make a house a home, but they remind the potential buyer that the house is yours, yours and all yours. When you are house staging, your objective is for the potential buyer to see himself living in this house. His dream house wouldn’t have your kids’ school pictures in the hallway.

5. Neutralize your color scheme. Chocolate brown walls are dramatic, but your potential buyer may not share your taste or vision. A lighter neutral color is safe – and such a surface is easy for your buyer to paint over if she happens to prefer a fire engine red hallway.

6. No evidence, please. That means no fingerprints on the walls, no love notes written in dust on top of the piano, and no newspaper spread out from the easy chair onwards. I know you lead a busy life, but keeping the area inside your front door as close to showroom ready as possible stages your house to sell quickly. Let’s face it: we can live the fantasy of being the perfect housekeepers for a limited time!

7. Scentsational house!! Aromas can evoke great nostalgia and make you feel at home right away. Scented candles can do the trick with choices of vanilla cookies, coffee, and spiced cider. Another quick trick to waft a lovely fragrance through your staged house is to boil a variety of spices like cinnamon, cloves and all spice in a small pan of water on a back burner.