Interior Design VS Staging

Many people think that "staging" your home requires renting expensive furniture and having someone decorate your house -- a common misconception. A) You probably don't need to rent furniture at all unless the home you are selling is empty. Then you can decide on your budget and go from there. B) You don't "need" someone to decorate your house, but a lot of times it is worth it.

I've been taking a home staging course and I've learned a few things that I'm going to share today (I'll learn a lot more at a home staging conference in Denver in two weeks -- yay!).

Home pictures in magazines are usually interior design pictures. They look amazing and clean and modern (and I don't mean the style "modern" but "updated" -- this decade!, although this year is preferred). Most are impersonal and unemotional. To stage a home to sell, you need to take the interior design (i.e. Pier 1, Elle Decor, etc.) rooms and make them emotional. First of all you have to figure out who the potential buyer is, then make it emotional to them.

So, that's what I did for a showing of our house (no, it's not listed for sale -- we just happened to have someone call about it and want to see it). I decided to market to a young professional family with kids (which worked out well since that's what we are -- ha!). In Morgan's room I made a little play area with a dog "reading" Go. Dog. Go! to a group of other dogs (see pic below). It is best if you can make it gender neutral, but this is our house and Morgan's room so it's not gender neutral.

In her bathroom I did something that a kid might do with foam letters that should make the potential buyers either remember their kids doing something like that or imagine that their kids will one day.

For the sitting area I put together a family game night with Scrabble (the letters say "family game night"). It is supposed to help the buyers imagine themselves with their families and trigger an emotion to make them remember and love this house (isn't marketing intriguing?!)

To sum things up, staging is fun and necessary (especially in this market) to sell a house quickly. I don't prefer to have my home staged when nobody is going to be looking at it. I do like it to be designed though.