Dining Room Home Staging Tips

Dining rooms. They may be considered old fashioned in some homes because a lot of American families don’t entertain like they used to. However, if you have a dining room and you’re staging it to sell, let me share some staging tips for staging a dining room.

Welcome to the Creative Home Podcast, where we talk about home staging, moving, Decorating or updating your home decor. This podcast is perfect for homeowners and realtors who want real advice that works. I am your host, Kasha McDaniel. I’m a home stager and decorator for homeowners and real estate agents who just don’t know where to get started on staging or decorating their home and want to eliminate the guesswork on arranging your furniture, picking colors, and knowing what works best for you.

And it’s my goal through these episodes to answer those home staging, moving, and decorating questions to help you through each step of the process. So that you can see results and move into the next phase in your home life. Even if you have time constraints, a tight budget, or your kids are running around making you crazy.

If you are ready to learn about how to make your life easier, then you’ve come to the right place. I can’t wait to help you get started.

Hey there. Welcome everybody to the Creative Home Podcast. I am your host, Kasha McDaniel. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m really excited to be talking about staging again, because it is staging season. It’s the fall season. While it may not be the most prominent one, there are still a lot of homes for sale during the fall timeframe.

And we’re talking about dining rooms today and whether you have a formal or informal dining room. When you’re selling a home, it needs to play its part. It really does. Most times I will tell homeowners that their dining room should be shown as a dining room, but that varies depending on a few things. If it’s already a home office or a playroom, Maybe, um, there’s no furniture in there or the price point of the home.

Now I wrote about a blog about this, um, whether homeowners are looking for a dining room because it is kind of old fashioned and I got some input from some local realtors and I’ll share that link in the show notes below whether you should show it as a dining room or not. How important is a dining room?

But once we get past that idea, and we need to show it as a dining room, say you are at that price point of the home, that a dining room does need to show as a dining room, right? Let’s go over a few things that should and should not be there. So number one, first with the should. So, it should have the appropriate furniture.

Table and chairs, right? There should be a dining table with some chairs, um, to basically show off the space. You want to show that, you know, how big the table can fit in there. Maybe you have a larger dining room, so you have a longer table. Maybe that’s, you know, higher price point of the home. Normally homes are about, you know, the 500, 000 mark or more will have larger You know, dining rooms, right?

More formal ones, right? Um, you definitely want to have some kind of artwork and, um, to help you show off the space, kind of add, you know, if there’s a hutch or credenza or something like that, those are the types of things that you’ll want to have in the dining room for sure. Okay. Now this is just part of staging the house.

If you aren’t interested in getting your house staged, um, I do have a free guide. It’s called how to start staging now. Um, and I’ll leave a link in the show notes below, but it talks about how you can get started on a stage in your home. Okay. I am also doing, and I’m very excited about this, a 30 day home staging challenge.

Now, this one I’m really excited about because it’s the first time I’ve done as a challenge before, and it starts October 1st. So I’m getting you some, you know, getting you ready now before October 1st starts. So if you are getting ready to sell your house soon and you wouldn’t want to be on this challenge, well, basically what I do is I tackle a task or two each day.

To get you, um, ready for those pictures, those all important MLS real estate photos, right? Cause you want them to look professional and you want them to look good, right? You’re showing off your house. So in this 30 day home staging challenge, I will send you daily emails with a task for those that day, as well as a 30 day calendar.

That you can follow along or even maybe get ahead on certain things. Maybe you’re trying to rush it and you have, don’t have 30 days, but you want to get stuff done. Right? So this is a great way to get started on tackling some of those things that you probably haven’t thought about and you’re thinking, Oh yeah, I, okay.

So this little calendar, Remind you of the things that you need to work on. Okay. So when this 30 day challenge, I will send you daily emails with tasks and this 30 day calendar to get you started. Okay. So sign up at blue diamond staging and design. com forward slash home staging challenge 2024. I’ll leave that link in the show notes as well, but I I’m very excited to be doing this.

So this will be a lot of fun. Okay. So. Let’s get back to the dining room should not have items. Now there’s a lot of things that it should not have. And I’ve seen all of these things that I’m going to talk to you about in one form or another. Um, so you’ve seen pictures of what a dining room looks picture perfect, right?

On Instagram or Pinterest or whatnot, right? But you don’t see what a room looked like before that, right? So what it should not have or are toys and games in it. And we actually are guilty as charged on this one in our current dining room. If you walked in right now, you would find board games in our dining room on the floor there.

Basically we have a, um, a table, like an open table and underneath it. Um, yeah, there’s board games under there. Cause it’s our favorite. thing to do as a family. And it’s a large table and that’s where we play our board games. So while yes, most of the board games are up in the bonus room and stuff, but the ones favorite ones that we pull out like Catan or Sari or pick another one.

There’s a lot of them. Um, Yeah, they’re in the dining room, but when it comes time to staging, those board games definitely have to go back to where they belong. They don’t belong in the dining room. Okay. Um, excess furniture, like bookcases. I had that actually in one house where, um, they had bookcase like three or four bookcases in the dining room.

That’s not normally what you see in a dining room. So we’re turning it back into what it’s supposed to be used as. Right. So basically take out all that. all those bookcases. You can put them in the living room. Maybe you need to downsize anyway because you’re moving out to downsize and those have to go anyway.

That’ll help you prepare for that as well. Okay. So get rid of excess furniture that doesn’t belong in the dining room. I’ve seen a changing table and lots of artwork. Yeah. The changing table has to go. I know sometimes you don’t have space for the little things that the kids just pile up, whether you have a walker or a, you know, other baby toys and things like that, the rocker and things like that, they get shoved in rooms that aren’t used very often.

And normally that’s the dining room. Yeah, but when it comes time to staging your home, that stuff needs to get out as well and put away and put in a spot that if you really still need to use it, then put it in that room. So like a changing table, maybe you don’t have a baby room yet. Well, then we’re probably gonna have to put it somewhere in the master bedroom and basically kind of put it in a corner so that the photographer doesn’t take a picture of it right there.

Right. So you work with that.

Basically, a vacuum cleaner if you have like one of those Zumba things, Roomba. Sorry, I got the wrong thing going here. Um, the vacuum cleaner set sometimes you’ve seen you know put those because you don’t have a closet to put in there. So basically clutter, things that don’t belong in the dining room, need to come out be put away where it needs to go.

Another thing to think about is the wall color in the dining room. And now I know many, many times you’ll probably see pictures or even your parents may have this is that their dining room walls are red. Yeah. And it’s supposed to basically be a color to entice, you know, cause you’re hungry, right? It’s a love of food and the red color is supposed to portray that.

You’re not when we’re staging a house. Okay. Um, that red is actually kind of a difficult color to photograph. Um, I’ve talked about this before in previous episodes, when you are painting walls, that a red wall color is not a neutral wall color. That’s not the color that we need in the dining room. Okay. It needs to be a neutral wall color.

Not red. All right, so just paint over it now and get it ready to sell. Okay? Um, and then the last thing is I don’t set the table when I’m staging a house. The dining room does not, is not a museum. Right. It’s meant to be used as every other room in the house is to be used, right? There shouldn’t be just a mock setup of all these plates and dishes and knives and glassware and everything set up as if you’re about ready to have a party.

Like you walk in, you’re like, wow, where’s the party? Who am I? The first guest yet? No, because there’s a couple of reasons why you don’t set the table. Um, number one, because you don’t know who’s coming into your house. The kids may be running around, knock things over by accident. And your favorite China may be chipped or broken or God forbid, stolen pieces, things, whatever, you know, they find something really pretty.

Yeah. So just don’t set the table. You don’t set the dining room table. It’s not realistic. That’s not how you live. And home staging is not meant to be in a way that it looks like you’re trying to fake something, right. It’s meant to feel, make you feel comfortable, not walk in like, Oh, there’s a. Party going on because the table is set for, you know, 10.

So please don’t set the table when you’re staging your dining room. Okay. That’s all fake TV stuff. That’s not real staging. All right. So those are just a few tips on what you can do to stage your dining room. Don’t forget to sign up for the 30 day home staging challenge that I invite you to join me in October, the whole month of October, I’ll be sending you daily tasks and a calendar, So that you can get your house ready to sell.

So if you like this episode, please subscribe and follow me on my YouTube channel, blue diamond staging and design, or on your favorite podcast player for the creative home podcast. We’ll talk to you later.

Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of the creative home podcast. This podcast gives me a chance to help you with Staging, moving, and decorating. So I hope you come back and listen for more tips. If you have a question or have a suggestion on what I should cover on a future episode, let me know.

I would love to hear from you. You can DM me on Instagram at blue diamond staging and design, or email me at Kasha K A S as in Sam I A at blue diamond staging. com.