No one wants their home to sit on the market, especially if they’ve already found their new home. Luckily, there are things you can do to make your home more attractive to potential buyers. In today’s blog, the interior design experts at Star Furniture show you how to stage your home to sell quickly using some of the best home staging tips to entice buyers.
What is Home Staging?
Home staging is the process of making your home more appealing to potential buyers by redecorating, rearranging furniture, decluttering, cleaning, and other aesthetic strategies that aim to present the home in the best possible light.
Home Staging Tips
Declutter Your Home
Staging your home to sell is all about creating a space that potential buyers can envision themselves living in. Clutter prevents that from happening. Rather than imagining what it would be like for them to live in the house, they’ll become curious about what it’s like for you to live in the house. And instead of focusing on the rooms, they’ll be drawn to your belongings. Plus, cluttered rooms tend to look smaller, which is never what you want when trying to sell. Not sure where to begin? These decluttering tips can help you get started.
Replace Worn Furniture
We get it. You don’t want to spend a ton of money replacing furniture that fits a house you’re leaving. But people have a limited imagination, and if your furniture looks worn and dated, they’ll likely project those feelings onto the house itself. That’s why one of our best home staging tips is to replace worn furniture before you start showing your house. If it’s not in your budget to replace the item and it isn’t essential, you could also put it in storage so that it’s out of sight when people are touring your home. In fact, professional home stagers often store as much as half of the furniture in people’s homes so that the house looks bigger.
Take Advantage of Storage Furniture
While you’ll likely put some of your furniture in storage when staging your home, the furniture you keep should be as impactful as possible. That’s where storage furniture comes in. It’s hard to beat the appeal of ample closet space, so the more items you can stash away in hidden storage benches or accent cabinets, the better. That way, you can keep your closets from looking cramped and cluttered.
Be Sure to Accessorize
Just because you can’t afford to update your furniture doesn’t mean you won’t be able to stage your home to sell quickly. In fact, so much of the magic is in the details. In fact, refreshing your rugs can go a long way toward making your space look fresh and fun. You can also add a pop of color and style to your living room with the right throw pillows and you can make your bedroom look cozier with the right bedding. Pro Tip: Making your bed like a designer can make your bedroom look straight out of the pages of a glossy magazine.
Decorate with Mirrors
Looking for inexpensive home staging tips? Try decorating with mirrors. When placed directly next to or across from windows, mirrors can amplify natural lighting and brighten up dark rooms. But that’s not all they do. Tactfully placing mirrors throughout small rooms can help create the illusion of space, which makes small rooms appear larger than they actually are. Plus, there’s no better way to help a person imagine themselves in your home than for them to literally see themselves in it.
Pay Attention to Lighting
It’s easy to overlook lighting when you’re staging your home. But making your house feel bright and vibrant will make it way more appealing to potential buyers. Remember, when lighting a room, you should be layering ambient lighting, task lighting, and accent lighting. You’ll also want to combine warm lighting, which typically has shades of red, orange, and yellow with cool light, which has bluish green undertones. In fact, our guide to how to light a living room like a designer can help you layer your lighting like a pro.
Rethink Your Furniture Layout
We generally advise people to consider the function of the room when choosing a living room, dining room, or bedroom layout. But if you’re staging your home to sell, you’ll want to focus more on the look and feel of the room rather than what’s practical. That’s why rethinking your furniture layout is one of our favorite home staging tips. Pro Tip: While it’s tempting to think that a room will feel bigger if the furniture is pushed against the wall, floating your furniture away from the wall makes the room feel bigger and helps with traffic flow.
Don’t Leave Walls Blank
If you’ve read anything about home staging, you know that you should take down family photos, kids’ artwork, diplomas, and other similar items to depersonalize the space. But that doesn’t mean you should leave the walls bare. Be on the lookout for neutral wall art that can add visual interest to your space. And if home décor isn’t your strong suit, check out our great resources on how to choose the right wall art for your wall and how to hang a picture like an interior designer. Now that you have the best home staging tips, it’s time to start staging. Browse our huge selection of furniture for every room in the house, including stylish home décor that can help take your home’s design to the next level. In the meantime, check out our interior design blog where we cover everything from how to decorate a bookshelf like a designer to living room essentials for your new home.