Home Staging Strategy

Hey there, home seller. Welcome to the Creative Home Staging Show. Come on in. Come in. Come in.

Hey. My name is Kasia. And in this show, we talk about home staging for home sellers. If you are getting ready to sell your house soon, you are in the right place. We cover home staging tips, strategies to help make it easier on you, and ways to influence buyers.

So roll up your sleeves, get a notebook and pen handy. Yes. I do things the old fashioned way, and let’s get your house ready to sell. Hey there, everybody. Welcome to another creative home staging show.

I am your host, Kasia McDaniel. And if you are watching me on YouTube, you’re gonna know something a little bit differently. We’re trying something different just to show you and give you a couple pictures and examples. So if you’re listening to the podcast, I will do my best to explain the pictures, but I will have a link in the show notes where you can follow along and see the same pictures that I am showing you in this podcast. Because today we are talking about my home staging strategy.

Now what I mean by that is, what is the process that I use when it comes time to staging a house? Everybody’s different in how they attack things. Right? Maybe you’re the kind of person that needs to do things in little bits and pieces. Maybe you’re the one that just buckles down and, you know, does it all in one day.

That’s fine. Whatever works for you. But I wanna share with you what I do when it comes time to staging your house or even my house when it comes time to sell it. So it’s gonna be more of a broad overview, and maybe this will help you understand how to maybe strategize your time and how to attack each room yourself. Okay?

So let’s dive in to my home staging strategy to help you sell your house faster. So what we’re talking about in this one is we’re going to be decorating to sell your home when it comes time to, to decorate it. Right? So we’re decorating to sell, not decorating to live. Let me get that straight to you for a second there.

Decorating to sell. We’re not decorating to live. It’s gonna look different when you’re decorating it to sell. Because when you live in your home, you decorate it with things that you like. Right?

Maybe you love the kitschy farmhouse stuff with signs and and all that kind of stuff. Maybe you love the, I don’t know, the wall colors that you have painted. Right? But when it comes time to selling your house, those are the couple of things that will probably be either toned down, removed, changed, just to help you sell your house faster because we’re trying to get it to and show off this home to a broader audience of buyers. Right?

So let me share with you what it is that I do when I go into each and every single room. Okay? So starting off with the first step is basically decluttering. You know, you walk into a room and you notice what? There’s clutter.

Probably there’s stuff on the coffee table if you’re in the living room or the dining room is full of paperwork on the table, homework area, whatever it may be. Right? All that clutter just needs to start going away. Now what that means for you is that this is the time when you should decide whether you need to keep some of that clutter, find a different home for it, obviously, but you’re gonna either keep it, donate it, or sell it, right, or pack it away because you want to take it with you, right? Because basically, clutter is something that just doesn’t have a home, right?

It’s not put away for whatever reason. It doesn’t have a home, there’s too much of it, whatever it might be, right? So the clutter is the first thing that really needs to go. And I’ll show you some examples and the next few pictures so you can understand where I’m coming from, okay, when I first come and see a house. The second thing I do is depersonalize.

Now that means basically anything that has your name on it or pictures of you or your family, all that stuff needs to come down. That’s the easiest thing that you can do. And you may realize that as you’re taking down photos and you’re taking down things and removing things that you’re gonna have to get some dust bins or dust cloths or something like that to start cleaning things. So as you’re doing and removing stuff out, you’re gonna have to start cleaning, get trash bags, get the, you know, the dust and the mops and and brooms and things like that, and kind of start cleaning things up. But what you’ll also notice that maybe if you start removing things is that you may need to fix some things.

So maybe your pictures were one of the heavier ones and you left a big huge hole in the wall. Now’s the time to fix that. Okay? Or maybe there’s a cabinet drawer, handle that’s broken. Right?

Now’s the time to fix that as you’re taking things out, removing, you know, those kinds of things. Right? The next thing we’re gonna do once you’ve done all that is you’re gonna rearrange, the furniture. You may remove some items. You may add some things.

You may realize, oh, there’s too many chairs in this room. Well, take it out. No one says you have to keep 10 chairs or how many chairs that you have. No one says the dining room table has to have 10 chairs, okay? Six is fine, four to six depending on the size of your dining area, right?

Okay. And then you’re going to add accessories with the finishing touches. So what I mean by this, when you go through each room as you go, this these are the steps that I do. And like I said, I automatically do this in my head as I’m looking at a room and say, okay. That needs to come out.

That needs to come out. Let’s move this over here. Let’s change that. And these are the colors we need to work with to help you get your house sold faster. Okay?

Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to allow buyers to imagine themselves living in your home. That’s the idea. You want them to kinda sit back on the couch and go, oh, yeah. I could live here. This is a really nice view, or this is a great size bedroom, whatever it is.

Whatever it is that they’re thinking, you want them to imagine themselves in the house. Are you getting ready to sell your home soon? Not sure where to get started on staging it to sell? Download my free guide, how to start staging your house now. I share how you can influence home buyers, what improvements to make that count, and 10 home staging tips you can do right now.

Go over to bit.ly/startstaging now and download your free guide today. So let’s start off with a picture, of some examples so you can kind of see. And like I said, for you podcast listeners, I would do my best to help, explain what it is that I see. So this is a picture of a living room. There’s a corner fireplace and there’s a couch and there’s a lot of clutter and boxes and just stuff on the floor.

So you need to start cleaning up. So this is a reminder. We’re talking about declutter decluttering, sorry, depersonalizing, we’re cleaning things up, fixing anything that’s broken. We might need to rearrange the furniture and accessorize. So when we did this one, living room, for example, yeah, a lot of the boxes had to go.

There’s lots of cords that are hanging off the TV just above the fireplace. We’re removing some of the furniture, and in this case, the homeowner wanted to move that couch into a different room and use it elsewhere. So we brought in a different couch and added different furniture pieces, and then we accessorized and kind of pulled it all together with color. So let me share with you the final picture of what we did, and this is the final living room in that space. Now we changed the orientation of the couch.

We kind of made it a a closer to the fireplace, a nice little cozy area with a chair. We used a blue rug because the floor was a darker color, so it’s a nice light blue with white and dark blue, kind of a color teal going in there, along with some throw pillows. And then we used some accessories on top of this cabinet here and kind of pulled it all together to show off this space that’s how you can use it as a living room, okay. So the next room that I have for you is a dining room. Same thing, same strategy, same process that we talked about.

We’re decluttering. There’s a lot of stuff in this living room or this dining room. For those of you listening, there’s a chandelier and there’s some pictures on the wall, and then there’s a lot of cardboard and paper and just trash. There’s a a kitty thing, like a rocker basically in there. There looks like there’s a a rug, looks like a gate on the floor.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in here that that that doesn’t make it look like a dining room whatsoever. Right? So, again, we’re going through the same strategy process of decluttering. We’re cleaning up things. We’re putting things away.

We’re rearranging. And, actually, in this case, we’re adding furniture because there’s no dining room table in here whatsoever. The only way you can tell this is kind of a dining room is the chandelier and the wainscoting that’s on the walls. Because it’s kinda like, well, this could be an office. This could be what what was it?

So we used as a dining room, and so we did bring in rental furniture for a dining room table. We brought in some artwork in there. Again, more blues in here because the walls are a light colored white cream color. And then we had a nice runner and some candles, and that’s it for the dining room. Nothing too extraneous.

Just show it off as the room that it’s supposed to be used as, okay, or could be used as. Right? Okay. So the next room I have for you is a master bedroom or a primary bedroom. This one, basically, there’s a bed with some, red sheets.

The bed is not made. There’s a nightstand that’s wooden with a lot of clutter on it. There’s some more clutter in the corner with some baskets, a laundry basket. Looks like there’s some pillows there. It’s just it looks like a bedroom, but it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t do anything for you, right?

So now this is the time again we’re decluttering, we’re cleaning, we’re rearranging. In this case, we’re actually removing the furniture. Again, we brought in some, lighter colored furniture in here. And this one, you don’t have to, you could use the same one, just use different pillows. And in this case we use different bedding lighter colored bedding, again going with the blue theme in this house.

So we have gray nightstand with the gray headboard, a chest of drawers with a, dresser. We put a rug in there so it all looks nice and neat in there and arranged and staged for this house. And I think the last one I have for you is oh no, I have two more. I have this entryway. So let me get my picture out of the way here.

So again, this entryway, there’s a lot again, more clutter, lots of stuff, and you’re probably looking in behind that entry. There was a cutout into another room that, again, has more clutter, more stuff in there that you just basically that’s how you live, and that’s fine. But again, we’re not showing off the house as how you live in it. We’re showing it how to decorate it to sell, okay? So we’re trying to fix up this entryway here.

There’s a green short bookcase on the ground with, some shoes that are kind of scattered in there. There’s some flower baskets, looks like some baby wipes, some cardboard boxes, just kind of things just thrown there, at the front entryway. And again, so what we’re doing again decluttering, cleaning up, rearranging furniture, and in this case we’re actually removing the furniture. Then what the homeowner had was a a different cabinet that they had in the garage. It was a nice, decorative kind of cabinet that we put in the entryway.

We used that, we put a pot of flowers, used some artwork that from a different room, and it’s just a nice clean entryway. Doesn’t have a whole lot, but just enough to show off, hey, this is the entryway. This is a nice sophisticated kind of a look for the entryway. Okay? The last one I have for you is an office that if you took a sneak peek, you kind of saw in the previous picture, like, wow, there’s a lot of stuff going on in there.

And sure enough, there is. There’s actually two desks in here, with two screens, monitors, keyboards, printer, lots of paper all over the floor. Just the floor is almost covered with stuff that is just scattered about. Right? So the room is big, but it’s really not that big for two desks and two chairs and computer systems.

There’s even a coffee table in here. So what I wanna share with you is what we did end up doing was that we took out one desk. We’d removed the furniture. We took out the clutter. And these black bookcases that were in here in the second picture and the after were actually in the room.

It was just next to me. We always taken the picture into the room. You couldn’t see it. But then we used those same bookcases and accessorized them with some items to kind of give it the function of an office and make it look like an office. And again, more artwork just to show off the space.

Like, look, this could be a homework station. This could be, you know, a office if you work from home. So those are just a couple of ideas and then my strategy so that you can understand where it is that I’m coming from for this, ideas that can help you, you know, get ready and get your house ready to sell. So with this strategy, like I mentioned, this is something that how I do things and how my mind processes things. Some of these things kinda happen all at once.

You know, as you’re decluttering, you’re depersonalizing at the same time and throwing things out and cleaning. Right? That happens kind of all at once. And then once you’ve cleaned out the room and you know what things really need to be in there, then you strategize on, okay, let’s rearrange the furniture. Let’s change the colors, maybe we need to add different accessories, whatever it might be, because that’s when it comes time that we’re trying to wow those buyers, transform your home, so that they fall in love with your home, and make an offer.

Okay? So I hope this gives you some ideas on how you can strategize to get yours house sold faster. And if you have questions or concerns, maybe you’re wondering, well, I need some more help, Kasha. Can you can you help me out here? I would love to help you.

We can do one on one home staging consultation for the whole house or just for one room if you are just stuck with one room and just don’t know or can’t agree with your spouse or significant other on what you need to do to stage that room. Okay? So I hope you guys have a fantastic week. Hopefully, this has given you something to to think about and mull over as a strategy to help you get your household faster, and I will talk to y’all later. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Creative Home Staging Show.

I hope you got some good tips in this episode, and I hope you come back and listen for more. If you wanna connect and want to take action, there are some ways you can stay connected with us. Number one, you can watch this episode on my YouTube channel at Blue Diamond Staging and Design to get more visuals. I like to share some short videos there as well, so take a look at my channel there. Number two, you can also leave a review.

Your feedback helps this show grow. You can go to the show and tap the three vertical dots to open a menu and hit rate the show. Number three, you can also find custom playlists from older home staging episodes that I called home staging do’s and don’ts, as well as pre home staging playlists for those of you who are new to home staging. And number four, if you have any questions about today’s episode or need some home staging advice, you can go to bluediamondstaginganddesign.com forward slash chat and contact me via email or call me. I hope that this podcast is just a way for you to get to know me and how I can help you.

Remember, you can do this, and staging is temporary. Keep up the good work, and I can’t wait to connect with you more.