Summit Mortgage Corporation resently wrote a wonderful blog with tips for selling your home. The first thing they suggested was staging, and they recomended working with us.

“Our friend Michelle Seidelman, owner of Staged to Sell, is where you should start when thinking about staging your home. Home staging is simple, cost effective, and can help decrease your house’s time on the market.”

It’s always great to hear good things, and I would like to plug Summit Mortgage Corporation in return. Their blogs have a lot of great advice, and they are wonderful people to work with : )

I’m a fan of staging with plants. This is something that can be overdone (a jungle of plants will just be distracting), but living in Oregon means that there are a lot of months of rain (which even native Portlanders tier of after a while). Without the benefits of sunny natural lighting during the winter months, plants do a lot to make a room feel brighter (along with some well placed lamps, of course ; )

Here are some different examples of using plants as accents in different types of rooms:

Do you need to stage every room in your home? Can the home stager work within your budget? If you were to only have a few rooms staged which would be the most important for your home? Why?

These are questions you should be able to ask your home stager. Every home is different, and the answers to these questions reflect that. Now, it’s important to remember that home staging is an investment (it’s never going to be dirt cheap, and you should be wary of a stager who won’t honestly discuss the costs involved), but it’s an investment that can help hasten your sale and help raise the offered price.  

A stager should be willing to work with you to create a plan that works for your home, and your budget. If you are in a situation where you only are going to stage a few of your rooms, it’s my job to help advise you on which rooms will have the most impact – and this will completely depend on your home, and it’s layout.

In the case of this recent staging, we staged the first two rooms you would see upon entering. Helping to create a flow through the home, and giving the potential buyer a warm first impression. These are also “functional stagings”, many buyers put a high value on the dining and living rooms, and it’s important that they can gauge these spaces by their function.

Though this was a three bedroom house, we chose to only stage one of them. When the potential buyer looked at the other empty bedrooms, they could call back to this one to help them guage what the others might look like.

 But why this bedroom?

This one had a very unique shape, and ceiling, becuase of this the room appeared much smaller when empty. Out of all the bedrooms it was the most difficult to visualize without furniture as reference.

 We also the covered seating area. This created a focal point for the backyard, and also showcased something that would be considered a luxery feature, one that adds value to the home.

To check out the listing click HERE

As I’ve written before about how neutralizing a home is often recommended as part of the staging process. In order to draw from a neutral color pallet, but without the starkness a straight white can sometimes bring – you see a lot of tan and beige colors used for wall paint.

So, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about the importance of the accent color pallet used in a thoroughly “neutralized” home. In the case of this resent staging the walls were painted tan, and the wood flooring was a rich brown. I matched the pallet with darker brown tones, and deep beige in the furniture to enhance the natural warm earthy feel. But if only earth tones are used, the room can become washed out (too neutral), so it is important to add bright accents.

In this case I used blue tones, and added visual complexity by focusing on the complimentary blues to the tan and orange-brown colors. The result is a warm inviting room but one that draws focus not to itself, but to the selling features of the home, like the wide window view, the natural lighting, the wood flooring.

Below are some more pictures from this same staging.

I’ve talked before about the importance of cleaning your home. Cleaning and decluttering are the first step to getting your home sold, and common advise most people already know. Despite this I have worked with people before who understand they need to get things picked up, but don’t understand how detailed the deep cleaning must be.

We’re talking every corner dusted and scrubbed, carpets steamed, wood floors polished, windows cleaned inside and out. A potential buyer will notice things that friends, guests and even the most difficult relative will not. Is this something you can do yourself? Absolutely, but be ready to put in a lot of sweat and time – it will be worth it.

For those of you who would like some support, there are cleaners who work specifically for homes on the market. I’d love to give a shout out to one such woman, Pamela Conder. I met her seven years ago and have worked with her many times, she has an eye for details and is the best cleaner I’ve worked with.

Feel free to shoot her an email: pamelaconder@comcast.net

Pamela is the one who first taught me to toss the Murphy’s Oil (it can actually be very harmful on wood flooring) and too instead use a vinegar solution.

For more great cleaning tips, check out these links:

http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/10-green-home-cleaning-tips1.htm

http://www.houselogic.com/home-advice/maintenance-repair/home-cleaning-secrets/

In this example, the living room and dining room are essentially attached to the same room (though the wall does jut out to create a visual frame distinguishing them). This is not an uncommon layout for homes. In cases like this we will use colors to create a visual divide.

Last blog I wrote about using angles to guide a potential buyer through the home. Creating a visual divide does not mean you will interfere with this. In open layouts like this the home will more naturally guide the buyer from the living room into the dining room.  Using differing color schemes will create a clear contrast between the two different spaces while emphasizing their different functionality.

I used red in the dining room, with a few blue accents. The living room in contrast was heavily blue with just a few hints of red (and the red of the brick around the fire place).

To view more pics from this staging click here : )

Ages back I touched on the importants of using angles in staging, in terms of helping draw a viewers eyes to the features of the home. So, I thought it would be nice to expand on this.

Now I’m not saying to just start turning your furniture willy-nilly, but it is important to understand that the lines your furniture makes will be one of the things directing the flow of your home. A strong staging won’t just emphasize the selling features of your home; it will also create a visual path that flows through each room.

In this example the horizontal lines of the entryway easily lead into the living room. The living room is then staged to create a series of subtle visual pathways that flow towards the dining room. Ideally a potential buyer will feel drawn from room to room with each rooms selling features equally highlighted by the staging.

Thinking of selling your home? Decluttering and cleaning is the first step to do.  As a stager I have written many blogs about the benefits of staging (here, here, here), and the ASP statistics above shows this as well… but today I want to talk about the part I highlighted.

That’s right, an average of 872% increase in return simply for cleaning and decluttering.

Now I know that decluttering can seem like a daunting task, but you will already have to go through everything to pack, so why not start early? Instead of looking at your home as a whole, break down the process room by room. Organize your things into 4 piles: Keep, Donate, Trash, Maybe (it’s a lot less stressful when you allow yourself the time to decide on items, and the more you sort through the easier it is to let go of things). As items are moved for organizing, it is easy to begin to deep clean hard to get areas.

It is also important to figure out what pace works best for you. Some people prefer to dedicate a few hours a day of work room by room, till they have organized their home. While others prefer to spend a long weekend intensively organizing a cleaning, and get it done as quickly as possible (I’m one of those prefer to power through and get it over with).

It is always surprising to me how many listings one can see posted online, where there hasn’t even been basic tiding done. So, if you are thinking about selling your home, think about the additonal $2,000 you could be making just by decluttering and cleaning : )

“Warm colors are said to advance or appear more active in a painting, while cool colors tend to recede; used in interior design or fashion, warm colors are said to arouse or stimulate the viewer, while cool colors calm and relax. “

Color Theory

 Home Stagers have a lot of experience working with neutral tones: such as tan. When talking about tradition interior design using warm and cool color pairings, this neutral tone needs special consideration.

Tan is a unique color, it combines the warm tones of brown with the cool tones of white. Because of this it can read as either cool or warm depending on the accent colors used with it. Since tan is also a neutral tone (and us stagers love our neutrals), it is important to anchor it to a strong accent color. In the case of a recent staging I did on 5930 SE Lafayette St, Portland OR, I used blue (which is one of my favorite colors to pair with this tone tan) as the secondary color in the staging. 

There were some basic errors being made. You can see how the flat screen was competing with the fireplace over what the focal point of the room was, and the placement of the furniture wasn’t directing attention to the living rooms’ highlights.

I used the rug to create a visual path for the potential buyer, a diagonal line that draws their gaze back to the fireplace. The furniture creates a frame around this focal point as well. I also worked to showcase the bright and airy feel of the room by drawing attention to the multiple windows. For any pest issues, make a call to the pest control dayton oh who are available 24/7 and have been professionals in this field for a long time.

I’ll post some more pics from this staging next week, can’t wait to share this wonderful home with you guys : )