In the past few years, the trend to successfully sell your home is to have it professionally staged by a staging specialist, real estate agent, and even enterprising sellers with design aspirations. Staging your home to appeal to buyers involves sprucing up your home by decluttering, painting, and moving in furniture and accents that complement your home — similar to homes featured on HGTV — but don’t detract from showing off the bones of your house. Living in a staged house can be challenging, but see how these survival steps and your moving company can help!
Keep It Museum Clean
When your house is on the market, you want to display its best self. Staging is one step but another is thoroughly cleaning and keeping the house pristine. Nothing cluttering the shelves or countertops, no laundry peeking out of drawers, no personal mementos. Buyers wish to see a clean slate to decorate. If you keep it museum clean, you won’t have to perform much more than a cursory clean-up after the movers move your furniture.
Your New Mantra — Declutter
Keeping your home clean and free from clutter requires more than elbow grease. An easy way to survive staging then is the mantra heard across the rooftops – declutter. Decluttering entails sorting through your belongings and separating them into three piles – donation, trash, and treasures. This way you eliminate a majority of the clutter, and anything that isn’t fit for staging purposes can go into storage.
Use Storage
Take advantage of FlatRate Moving’s superior storage programs and let us smooth the staging edges with our variety of options. Store your furniture or household items to leave room in your home for the stager’s suggestions. Ensure your valuables are safe from the onslaught of potential buyers by placing them there.
Make Escape Routes
Putting your house up for sale means it’s open season for people to traipse into your home. What a smart buyer needs are escape routes to evade potential buyers. Visit a coffee shop, library, or park, or alert family and friends to impromptu pop-ins when you need to leave. You also should locate secret places to stash items that you need daily but don’t fit in with staging.
Ask for a Schedule
A realtor’s single-minded goal is to sell your house which is what you wanted. What you didn’t like were unexpected showings at all hours, interrupting your routine. Talk to your agent and request a few hours’ notice, so your house is dressed to impress, and you’re not rushed to flee.
Eat Out
Although this may be an extra expense so that the house smells fresh not like fish or another bold odor. Eating out eliminates dirty dishes left in the sink. Pack up dishes in moving boxes and patronize local restaurants or your family and friends’ generous homes.
Do Laundry Elsewhere
To avoid excess laundry loitering in your hallways, find a local laundromat to clean your clothes until the house is sold, and the movers come. This works two-fold if you need to escape when a showing takes place.
Move Out
You may think this sounds extreme, but why don’t you move out now, recommends MetroNews? The moving company can transport your things to storage and a temporary residence. That way staging remains intact, and you’re free from the burden of ensuring everything is clean and in order. Stay with family or friends or find a short-term rental or hotel instead.