A Home Staging Challenge

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Unfortunately homes speak to us through their décor and like any communication we sometimes misinterpret the story. Did you assume this home was neglected and uncared for over the years? You would have been wrong. When a home has sparse furnishings arranged sporadically throughout the house based on a functional need only, it portrays an image of a home that has been neglected, even though that may be farthest from the truth.

The real story behind this room is that the owners have recently divorced, which brings us to the problem, err, challenge of the month...“Selling a home after divorce”. Selling a home after a marital break-up always poses a slight challenge, with the absence of some key furniture pieces that were taken during the division of assets, and the less than motivated Seller who is selling during, most likely, unpleasant circumstances.

But is it really a challenge? Not to your experienced Home Staging® Professional. Through their experience, your Home Stager® knows that the best way to make sure the home tells the proper story and removes any chance for misinterpretation. How do we do this? We start with the best possible solution and continue down the list until the problem is solved.

The first possible solution would be to buy your new furnishings now, rather than after the move, but when you are moving to a smaller home that might not be practical. With divorced couples that are dividing the equity of the home, it can be in the best interest of both to bring back some of the missing furniture until the home sells. If the spouse is not co-operative or no longer living within the same region, you are forced to start relying on a bit of creative Home Staging® tricks and techniques.

Let’s use the master bedroom pictured above, as an example. Here we have the master bedroom, with heavy closed curtains, lack of pillows, bed frame only, an office chair, crate, and small table. All of which do nothing to sell the most important bedroom of the home to potential Buyers.

Opening the curtains is the easiest step toward improvement, but not enough to ‘sell’ the space yet. Next, remove the pieces that are clearly not adding to the marketability of the room. Out go the bedding, the chair, the crate and the side table. Now, what can be borrowed from within the house? In this case, the dining room had a full dining set and didn’t require all of the chairs. Without diminishing the marketability of the dining room, we could safely take those nicer pieces of matching furniture to flank the bed. This brings us to the largest Home Staging® challenge.

What to do with the bed, the focal point of this room? Luck shows up in different forms with each Staging® project, and it turned out that, with this case, the home seller had new bedding tucked away for a ‘special occasion’. What could be more special than selling your home for top dollar? Exactly. Therefore, the bedding was replaced and we were only left with the last two challenges, lack of headboard and pillows, which we were able to resolve with a Home Staging® ‘trick’. By folding up the old bedding and tucking it behind the new pillow shams, the bed no longer looks like (excuse my bluntness) “a mattress in a frat house”, but a well loved space in a master suite. What's the "Story" telling, now?