Harmonizing Homes: October 2015

Top 10 Stupid Staging Ideas

What is the first thing that happens when you walk into any house ?? Smell is often our first response to stimuli. It alerts us to fire before we see flames. It makes us recoil before we taste rotten food. Justin Riordan wrote “your house should smell like nothing when it is being shown. Scented homes lead to one of two reactions.” For the full article by Justin Riordan

#10. Masking Smells

” Buyers who are chemically sensitive get headaches, irrigated eyes, or nausea and want to leave immediately.”
“Buyers wonder what you are trying to cover up and immediately become suspicious that you are a shyster”.

#9. Live plants in a vacant home – quickly die with out water.

When home staging, or decorating a home, one important element that will instantly add life and a feeling of hominess to a living space is the presence of something green. Don’t use real plants in a vacant home. There are many beautiful silks on the market.

#8 a quote from Justin Riordam ” if they can’t see past that ‘_________’ then they don’t deserve to buy my house.”

The truth is , if they can see past “_______” then you did a poor job preparing your house for the market. Let us also revisit “They don’t deserve to buy my house” – Once you please your home on the market it becomes a commodity. You have to take “you” and “your” feelings out of the equation.

#7 “I can just lightly stage this room and it will work” Well, not really as you need to show the purpose and scale of the room.

#6 “I am paying for the staging, you should only stage with things I like”. This is a huge one, and it has happened to me.

“Your going to use/hang that?” As Justin Riordan, indicated in his blog “You have hired a stager just as a department store would hire a visual merchandizer to display their times to sell to a customer. Your home is once again a commodity…. You need to detach totally!!

#5 “The style of staging should match the style of the house” – Not really – We want to make the potential buyer look at the house and how it was staged and see that their furniture can work in this room…

You don’t want to stage with exact period furniture – a well staged home will have various components to the staging style.

#4 ” We should make everybody take off their shoes before they enter. Really?? People are not going to want to take their shoes off to walk on your floors.

#3 ” We should pull out the staging as soon as the house goes into pending” Its never safe to removing staging items before the final inspection/closing date…..scheduled walk through… It happens all the time – premature furniture removal and the deal falls through…

you are not going to save any money on taking the furniture out early – you are under a contract for a specific period of time.
the rental company is not going to redeliver the same furniture 3. the stager will charge you additional cost to re-stage. Patients is a virtue.

Home For Sale Sign in Front of New House.

#2 Staging can fix anything” Wouldn’t that be great but ….look at this picture ( don’t hit your way into the tub)- staged nicely but it doesn’t fix the bathroom issue.

#1 “stupidest” idea…”staging is easy” – Check this video out on what Barbara Corcoran has to say about staging.
Barbara Corcoran on the Benefits of Home Staging

References

Special thanks to Jeanette Schalpfer Broker/Sales Manager for sending me this article.

Author of Top 10 Stupid staging ideas – Justin Riordan

Harmonizing Homes – Corinne Kaas

RESA – look for a stager in your area

FRIDAY FEATURE #5VISITING FRIENDS“If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.”

Okay, what happened to summer??…..We left on Friday September 25th for a few days of vacation down in warm sunny South Carolina….Came back on Wednesday and summer’s door was slammed shut! Its cold, grey and rainy….. and everyone is stocking and gassing up for….

HURRICANE JOAQUIN

but enough of things that are out of my control…….

We were able to spend a few days with some very dear friends of ours that moved down to Charleston area of South Carolina last year from Spring Lake Heights NJ…. Our visit was filled with laughter, food and wine….you can’t ask for a more relaxing vacation.. which is very hard for some people i.e. my husband! He can not sit still… He had to do something.. talk about precision…..look at these pictures dead center and 2″ spacing….I would have eye balled it…

Before they left NJ…..we had talked about painting their bedroom set…which never happened for various reasons…Ellen decided she was going to try her hand in painting with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. We headed to Charleston Revisions in Mount Pleasant SC for our supplies. First we worked on a few samples to decide what color we were going to use on this project… these are the colors that were decided on….

Before we got started I wanted to show how various shades could be achieved by simply adding some old white to the Chateau Grey and Versailles….here are the results….with a little red wine splashed on there… we decided on 50% Chateau Grey and 50% old white without the splash of red wine.

Now we had to head out to the store for some sand paper, paint brushes….well lets say we ended up getting a cart…as we decided to do some planting also….