How to Stage a Kitchen to Sell

How to Stage a Kitchen To Sell Fast

If you’re selling your home and want to sell your house fast, you need to know how to stage a kitchen.

What do you look for when shopping for a home? Are you craving a big backyard with tons of space for the kiddos to run around in and a nice fence for privacy and to hedge in your dogs? Do you need lots of windows for natural light to cheer up your mornings?

Or, are you like me and look for a spacious kitchen that will be the center of your home where you can gather with friends and family around delicious food?

As in, a great kitchen is totally a non-negotiable.

Chances are that you are not only craving a fantastic kitchen space, but it’s a must have on your list. Well, guess what? You and I aren’t the only ones.

Home Staging A Kitchen

In fact, the kitchen is now considered to be the most important room in the home. So much so that many homeowners are shelling out big bucks for kitchen renovations to turn a modest kitchen into a workspace where Gordon Ramsey would feel right at home. These renovations don’t come cheap though, one estimate has them running anywhere from $50,000 and $150,000.

Because of this new trend, the kitchen is a place where you definitely want to pay special attention and make attractive and inviting when staging a home to sell. But, you don’t have to have a huge renovation budget to accomplish this, in fact you don’t have to remodel your kitchen at all!

With a few simple tricks, you can stage your kitchen and have it look and feel cozy and inviting for potential homebuyers! Here are my top five tips for staging a kitchen to sell.

5 Tips to Stage A Kitchen

Keep it clean. I mean, clean the kitchen.

First things first, clean that kitchen like you have never cleaned it before. I’m talking walls, floors, cabinet doors, inside of cabinets, the oven, the fridge, the light fixtures, baseboards, the ceiling.

Scrub-a-dub-dub everything you can see and everything you can’t Make it sparkle and make it shine.

If this feels daunting it might be worth hiring a professional to come in and clean for you. Oftentimes hiring someone to clean can be very affordable, and they also have fantastic cleaning chemicals and cleaning tricks and tips that make it easier for them to do the job than it is for you to do it yourself.

Declutter Your Kitchen

Remove small rugs and stow them elsewhere.
Take everything off of the refrigerator except a few attractive magnets.
Go through your pantry and toss out that bag with just the ends of a loaf of bread in it and those fifteen thousand packets of takeout ketchup.
Un-junk the junk drawer.
Counters should be clear with only a few exceptions (see the last tip of this list).
You want to declutter the space in order to make it look as large and clean as possible, while still making it look inviting.

Make Your Kitchen Smell Good

Consider how your kitchen smells. Does last night’s fish curry still linger in the air? Is the garlic from your famous bolognese sauce still dominating the dining room?

Better yet, ask a friend (one of the brutally honest ones) to come over and sniff around. She’ll be more likely to smell your house since your brain has already turned off the smells from your own home.

If you are in a pinch, open the windows, run an exhaust fan and spray an air deodorizer to get rid of food smells. A better option is to dine out a day or two before a big home showing to avoid stubborn cooking odors.

You can also try out one of these DIY home scenting tips from my post on how to make your home smell amazing, or try the old realtor trick of sticking a batch of cookies into the oven to get some delicious smells to warm up the space.

Organize Your Kitchen

Anything that is inside your cabinets needs to be super neat and organized.

I know, I know, why would they look inside your cabinets? I don’t know why, but trust me, they will, so make it pretty. I’m talking all of the coffee cup handles turned the same way, alphabetize your spices and line them up in pretty little rows. Stack the plates neatly and remove any random ones that don’t match with a set.

Seriously. This is a must-do when staging your house to sell.

Make Your Kitchen Inviting

Nothing should be on the counters except a few decorative canisters, a nice simple canister of cooking utensils, a few nice appliances such as a fancy coffee pot (scrubbed and buffed till it shines) and/or a Kitchenaid mixer, and a decorative handsoap. A lovely live plant or carefully arranged vase of flowers can add a delightful pop of color and warmth as well.

There you have it! It is easy to stage your kitchen beautifully and invitingly for your potential home buyers. Happy staging!

Budget Farmhouse Kitchen Remodeling Ideas

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Budget Farmhouse Kitchen Renovation

This is the story of our surprise complete farmhouse kitchen renovation from Main St. All in, we completely renovated our 1900 cottage farmhouse kitchen for under $3000! Floor to ceiling!

Not so long ago, we bought a house. This sweet little house was 120 years old and was supposed to be a temporary little house for us to live in while we made some major life changes (think: changing careers and a serious drop in pay in order to spend more time together as a family).

This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.

Well, I hope this has never happened to you, but the house we thought we bought and the house we walked into right after closing with our shiny new keys were two completely different houses. It reeked of cigarette smoke and the dirt was layered much thicker than I remembered from our earlier visits.

I put on my big girl panties and went to work deep cleaning our house, hoping it would only take me 3-4 days to get it spic and span.

Can you tell where this story is going?

Well, the first day we owned the house, we loaded up on cleaning supplies and headed over to our new old house. We cleaned all day, and as my almost-two-year-old was ready to head to bed (at family’s house) that night, I called in the third shift, my husband and cleaning extraordinaire mother-in-law.

They cleaned for even more hours into the night and I laid my head on the pillow to get my little one to sleep hoping that I could walk back into our house the next morning with fresh new confidence. (And let’s not discount the weenie-factor guilt I was experiencing over having my husband and his mom clean the dirty house in my place!!!)

I wish I could tell you that their elbow grease, bleach, and scrubbie bubbles made everything better. But the truth is that when I walked into the house the next morning, the cabinets were streaking with brown (where they did some heavy sanitizing and let it sit overnight). It was at that point I swallowed all of my tuff-girl pride and flipped completely into princess mode, making my case that the kitchen needed to go.

It was at that point I swallowed all of my tuff-girl pride and flipped completely into princess mode, making my case that the kitchen needed to go.

This picture makes the kitchen look so cute and innocent, huh? Don’t let it fool you.

Thankfully, that was an easy pitch to sell because the kitchen was so small anyways and was built with very rustic (and unsealed::disgusting!!!) butcher block countertops and Ikea cabinets (you know, the kind attached to the wall with a rail, so they’re not hard to remove).

See this unsealed homemade butcher block (at the bottom right)?! Gag!

Complete Budget Kitchen Renovation

Here’s how it went down.

Budget Kitchen Renovation: Demo

The next weekend, we quickly got to work pulling out the kitchen, and can I just tell you the relief I felt after seeing those cabinets pulled apart. Girl, there was dirt in all kinds of places I could have never ever gotten a rag into to clean!! So, I’m not a princess after all and I’m so glad we bravely took on this crazy task of renovating our kitchen (and even more relieved I’m not storing food and plates in those cabinets full of…well. I’ll save you the gory details).

First, we turned off the gas to the stove and removed it for safety’s sake. Then we got to taking the cabinets off the walls. It was a crazy fast demo. Except. For the vinyl tile. It was a bear. I would definitely not recommend removing tile linoleum from a 100-year-old house, as I’m fairly certain some of those materials could have been toxic. Yikes. And the glue. The glue was the worst to get off, for sure.

Here’s a photo of the vinyl tiles as we ripped them out and piled them up. It’s a little blurry, but you get the idea.

But the good news is that most of the kitchen renovation was smooth sailing after we got the floor up. Installing a kitchen can be a breeze if you measure correctly and have all the materials you need. We planned our kitchen around an apron double sink from Ikea, and after weeks of waiting, there just weren’t any in stock. So, after ordering our custom countertops, we had to reconfigure the kitchen based on a single basin apron sink. I think it worked out better in the end because a tiny kitchen needs the countertop space more than the sink size. But if it weren’t for that hiccup causing a few shifts and delays, this full farmhouse kitchen renovation would have been finished really quickly.

Budget Kitchen Renovation: Shopping

Lots and lots of shopping went down. I shopped until I found the most affordable (with the most storage) cabinet configuration that would fit in our space. We landed on Ikea cabinets with drawers and Grimslov drawer fronts.

This wasn’t our final choice, but I seriously considered this cabinet configuration and was wooed by the grey. I chose white in the end because our kitchen was so small and needed the light.

I priced out faucets and disposals and flooring. We found our appliances on Craigslist (totally scored there!!!). We ordered our custom WilsonArt Formica countertops (and ordered them again).

I absolutely loved the laminate countertops! They were so beautiful and resilient that I am planning on installing them in my (still budget, but more luxe) kitchen we have now.

After all the old materials were removed, I did a quick scrub down of the walls and repainted them (Moonshine 2140-60 | Benjamin Moore).

There was some water damage by the back door, so Nathan and his dad replaced a small joist beam thing and patched it back up.

Budget Kitchen Renovation: Flooring

I am from the carpet (and probably flooring, too) capital of the world, so I headed to Dalton to snag a deal on flooring. We found a gorgeous gray reclaimed-looking linoleum sheet that would cover the entire kitchen for $100. No kidding. We had linoleum in our old kitchen, and I actually loved it. It was clean (no grout to scrub every few months) and no worries about water damage. Plus, it was easy to install! Bonus.

My mom and brother came down to help me install it. We started around lunchtime and finished by dinner. That included meet and greets, planning out the final details before we laid it, trimming, and gluing. It was a total piece of cake. And super cheap flooring at $100 for the whole kitchen. Perfect for our budget farmhouse kitchen.

My sweet goober brother. He’d probably kill me if he knew I put this here. Shhh. Don’t tell him (lookin’ at you, here, mom!).

Budget Kitchen Renovation: Cabinets

Then, I started assembling the cabinets from Ikea. If you’ve assembled anything from Ikea, you can assemble these cabinets. They are much sturdier than their furniture and have a few nuances that are a bit different than regular furniture, but it’s a breeze once you get the first one put together. If you get Ikea cabinets and choose drawers, definitely go for the soft-close bumpers. Those drawers can hold more weight than you think (think: my entire pots and pans cabinet in one drawer), and you’ll be thankful that they aren’t smushing you (or your babies’) fingers!

Budget Kitchen Renovation: Countertops, Plumbing, & Electrical

If you remember the part where our double apron sink never came back in stock but we already ordered our countertops, this is where the waiting game began. I sat the first round of countertops on top of the cabinets (to give us a workspace) while I waited for the countertops to be delivered. We slid important pieces into place (to make sure they fit and get them out of the way) while we waited, but didn’t install them yet.

Because of the reconfiguration, we needed to do some wacky work with the sink plumbing, but we cleared all of it through a professional plumber to make sure we were cool. Whwew. A green light there. It took a few extra days (and cutouts :P) to fight those cabinets into place against the plumbing, though.

Nathan’s dad is hard at work on the plumbing.

We also updated the outlets to GFCI outlets to keep everything as safe as it could be in that old house.

Once the new countertops were delivered, I installed them onto the cabinets. Countertops are literally just screwed into the cabinets from below. Crazy easy. Then, we (we being Nathan and his dad) installed the Ikea farmhouse sink, new disposal, and the dishwasher.

Check out this gorgeous countertop! I just love that it’s such a light pattern, and not too busy.

I did some serious review reading online for disposals. Apparently, they can be pretty temperamental. We landed on this little guy and I think it was more than sufficient. It was also the quietest disposal I’ve ever used. Score!

We were well on our way to a brand new kitchen for less than $3000!

The fridge fit! Nevermind that those countertops weren’t in yet.

I also had a hard time finding a faucet I loved, but I did eventually choose this faucet and it wasn’t long before I just knew it was perfect for this farmhouse kitchen renovation.

After the kitchen plumbing was finished, we installed the cabinet kickboards (the part of the cabinets that hide below it and catch all the crumbs and dirt), painted the trim (this should be been done much earlier, oops!) and installed a few finishing pieces of trim between the cabinets and along the baseboards.

Finally, we added a new light (similar here) & door knob and it was as pretty as a button.

I love how easy it was to install and key this door knob to our other house keys. And yes, that door has had 100 years of “love.”

All in all, I think this farmhouse kitchen renovation turned out gorgeous.

Budget Kitchen Renovation: End Result

Here are a few photos of the finished budget kitchen remodel. If you want to see the whole house, you can see the full home tour here.

Budget Kitchen Renovation: In Review

Would I do it again? After seeing the inside/hidden condition of those old cabinets, absolutely! In a heartbeat!

Was it easy? Considering we were doing 5 projects at once during the kitchen renovation (bathroom, closet, crawl space, and whole house painting, plus work and school), I would say the work was easier than the waiting, so be sure to have everything you need on-hand before you start.

Can a beginner renovate their own kitchen? I believe with enough trips to Home Depot and enough YouTube videos anyone can do a job properly with the right tools. We had lots of tools available to us (plus we knew we could rent what we didn’t have at HD), and some great advice/help with the basic electrical and plumbing work.

If you know how to replace a light switch and glue together pvc, are thorough in your measurements, willing to ask for help at a home improvement store (or from family!), and either buy or rent the tools you need, I’d say definitely!

So, there you have it. Our surprise farmhouse kitchen renovation from our surprise flip house.

That house was full of surprises. 😉

If you’re wondering about our budget breakdown, here is the (approximate) breakdown of our budget.

Final Kitchen Remodel Budget

100 + labor: Vinyl floor
500 + installation in SS appliances including 5 burner gas stove and dishwasher and ice maker in fridge purchased from Craigslist
100 + labor:    Garbage Disposal
1330 + labor:     Custom cabinets (drawer cabinets) and hardware
200 + labor: Farmhouse/Apron Sink from Ikea
250 + labor: Fancy laminate countertops (not counting our first order that we changed our mind on) from Home Depot
200 + labor: Faucet with pull down spray
30 + labor:        New light fixture from Home Depot
100 + labor: GFCI outlets
$2780 Total Renovation Budget

Recommended Home Staging Items to Sell Your Home Fast

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If you’re wanting to sell your house fast, I’ve got some good deets for you today!

Our family just made 2 moves in one year with a toddler, dog, and two cats in tow. And we sold both houses in a day. Well, pretty much. The second one is a long story, but we accepted our first offer in a day (even though they weren’t the end buyers since we had 2 backup offers!).

This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.

Anyway, we sold both of those houses for full list price, and we even thought we priced them a little high. I’m going to be the first to say that there was a lot of prayer that led up to selling those two houses fast, but my real estate agent swears my home staging tricks sold both of those homes.

If you just want some general tips for home staging, you can read this blog post about staging a house to sell in a day. And if you want more detailed instructions, this post with 30 easy tips to sell your house fast might be more your speed.

Key purchases for a quick home sale

But if you’re ready to get down to the nitty gritty, there were a few key purchases that I am sure helped our house feel fresher, cleaner, and brighter, leading to the quick home sales we had.

I know. You want to save all that extra dough to pay the movers, put down on your next house, and essentially survive the move you are about to go through. But, the steps you take right now will determine how healthy your wallet will be when you walk away from the closing table.

In my head, spending $100 or even $200 or $300 on home staging could mean an extra $1K, $2K or $3k in my pocket, so even though we are a single income family on a serious budget, we made it work. If you spend a little bit of extra money on items for your home that will

If you spend a little bit of extra money on items for your home that will give it a fresh, professionally decorated, magazine feel, it is very likely that you will reap an even greater reward later. Plus, you can stick to purchasing items for home staging that you love and will use later.

I’m not going to lie, I did use this time as an opportunity to purchase classic decor items for my home that I have actually really enjoyed the past year. I feel like my home is more put together, just by having that $13 fake boxwood from Homegoods sitting on my table. It’s the little things, right?

Anyway, here are my personal recommendations for home staging. If you have Amazon Prime, you’ll get them in 2 days. That’s plenty of time to get them set up and your house on the market by next weekend.

Home Staging Bedroom & Bathroom Decor

Home Staging Living Room Decor

Home Staging Kitchen & Dining Decor

Home Staging Decor & Florals

Not sure which home staging items you need most?

Let me help!

For this month only, I am opening a few free mini home staging consultations! I am offering a free mini-consultation (worth $149) to give you custom advice on what to do with your home.

You can send me up to 5 pictures of what your house looks like now, and I will respond back with a list of items you can do in each room to get it listing-ready. Think action items like “Declutter desk” “Hide/remove toilet bowl brush” and “Move sofa to “x” location.” You’ll get steps you can actually take to get your home show-ready in no time with no guesswork involved.

To reserve a free mini-consultation, you just need to hit this box and drop in your email address to claim your spot. You’ll hear back from me soon with our next steps so that we can get you the feedback you’ve been needing.

So, if your house is currently on the market (or you wish it was), this time next week you could be preparing for appraisals, inspections, and closings. Or you could be wishing that you knew what to do to get your house show-ready before it hit the market three weeks ago.

Which one do you want to be?

I think I know the answer.

I’ve been there. Let me help you.

Sign me up!

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30 Easy Home Staging Tips

9 / 1 / 163 / 21 / 18

If you’re just starting home staging, check out this post about the basic process I used to stage our house to sell in 36 hours and get multiple offers.

Warning: The before photos of our house are so embarrassing. There was a lot of “life” happening in that house with everything from a sick family (complete with ER visits), Christmas, moving, renovating…you name it. Look ahead with grace. Yikes.

When you’re ready to begin preparing your home for the market, the absolute first thing you should do is go outside and stand around in your front yard. Imagine you are a buyer coming into the home for the first time. Pay attention to where your eyes naturally look and take lots of notes.

Walk into every room and imagine you are someone with different tastes and styles. What stands out at you? What could be toned down to appeal to everyone, but still remain fresh? Did you see that spot on the carpet? Yikes. Better put that on the list…

Be mean. Look at your home objective and critically. If you’re having a hard time seeing it objectively, get it “ready” in your eyes, then walk around and take some photos. Then, compare photos of your home with photos of other homes that are on the market (just avoid the ones that have been listed for weeks…unless you want your home listed for weeks). The camera doesn’t lie when it comes to clutter.

Yikes. Do you see all that clutter that just happened in our house?! I told you the camera doesn’t lie.

The great news is that home staging doesn’t have to be expensive. Sometimes, all it takes is removing some of your personal items and giving everything a good scrub-down for your home to be warm and inviting. Even an older home can be market-ready with the right attention, even if it doesn’t have granite countertops and hardwood floors.

Here is a quick list of things to take care of around the house as you go.

Kitchen

Clear off the tops of the cabinets.
Clear off the entire countertop.
Choose the one or two cabinets/drawers you think buyers will check and organize those.
Organize pantry.
Make sure the top of your refrigerator is cleaned off if it is accessible.

Bathrooms

Clear countertops except decorative soap dispensers and simple decor.
Remove plungers and trash cans.
Remove rugs.
Hide extra toilet paper.
Replace decorative shower curtains with simple white shower curtains.
Clear out all soaps (and medicines), and replace with spa-looking soaps.

Bedrooms

Remove everything except main furniture (dresser, nightstands, and bed).
Put your most luxurious light-colored comforter on the bed.
European pillows are your friend (at least 2 for queen, 3 for king).
Pick up all kids toys. If it can’t fit on a shelf it should go in a box.
Replace blackout curtains with white curtains (I got ours from Ikea).
Remove everything from dresser and nightstands except decorative elements.
Remove 1/2 to 2/3 of clothes and items in closets.

Living Room/Common Areas

Pick up all toys.
Minimize electronics and wires.
Add throw pillows to couches/chairs.
Move furniture to center of room in a cozy gathering area and remove all furniture that doesn’t fit into the simple layout.
Add decorative elements like flowers.

Outside

Pick up all clutter including toys and decorative elements.
Plant fresh flowers for a pop of color.
Add fresh pillows to outdoor furniture.

Right before showing

Replace used towels with fresh decorative towels.
Hide the trash can (or take it out of the house altogether). Even if it’s large.
Turn on all lights.
Open all blinds and curtains.
Set thermostat to comfortable temperature.

Staging our home with a toddler and pets around has been a major project, but I know it is the reason we received multiple offers at a price we thought was over market value. The time I put into staging our home proved to be completely worth it in the end.

Do you need a general overview of how we staged our house to sell for full price? Head on over to this post to read more about the overall process of how to stage a house to sell fast.

Want a little more help?

If you’ve already given staging your house a try, but you still aren’t sure if you’re doing the right things and just need a second opinion, I totally get it. Sometimes it helps a ton to have an outside perspective, especially in a house. You have a tendency to see the day-to-day messes, while an outsider will have an overall perspective.

By the second house I staged in a year, I had the listing process down to a science. Similar to the rules of home decor, there are rules to home staging. I understand the rules and can help you sell your house in no time.

For this month only, I am opening a few free mini home staging consultations! I am offering a free mini-consultation (worth $149) to give you custom advice on what to do with your home.

Which one do you want to be?

I think I know the answer.

I’ve been there. Let me help you.

Sign me up!

Save

How to stage a house to sell in a day

4 / 2 / 163 / 21 / 18

Home Staging To Sell Your House Fast

If you’re doing some home staging to sell your house fast, you’re in the right place. I’m going to share my favorite home staging tips for a quick sale! We just listed our house for sale. It’s been a long journey to this point, but when all is said and done, we have a beautiful house as an end product. And staging the house was just the cherry on top. We sold our last house in 36 hours and this house already has 3 offers on it!

This is the general overview of how to stage a home. Check out this post if you’re looking for a detailed step-by-step list of how to stage your house to sell.

This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.

Steps to Stage A House To Sell Fast

Get a vision of what it should be.

Think of a vacation rental or your favorite homes in magazines. When you are listing your home for sale, it should look like a vacation rental. It is clean, it’s organized, and it’s decorated. It’s simple but not bland. It’s equipped but not cluttered.

The Most Important thing: Prepacking!!

The absolute most important element of home staging is decluttering. If you don’t need it every single day, it shouldn’t be out. Would you pack it to take on vacation? Nope? Then you don’t need it while your house is on the market.

And the things that you will need the next few weeks (like a toothbrush) need to be tucked away in a proper place (like a drawer). If you absolutely must keep something out that is not solely decorative, put it in a basket. Every surface in your home should be for decorative purposes only (except maybe your cable box under your tv). Even your soap dispensers should be simple but decorative. These soap dispensers are inexpensive and will appeal to almost anyone.

If you aren’t committed to pre-packing and decluttering, then why list your house for sale at all? Commitment to a show-worthy house will make is sell-able. So, either, you’re in, or you’re not. So decide now because if you can’t pre-pack, then you aren’t ready for the next step of staging a house….

Take everything away. AKA Declutter again.

This part hurts a little so get ready. You’ll need to pack away everything that you either don’t use every day or doesn’t make your house beautiful. Get a stack of boxes and moving supplies (this kit makes it easy to get started). Make a pile in the center of each room with all the things that did not fit in their proper place (like extra towels, knick knacks, and appliances (fans, humidifiers, toasters, etc)). You are going to put each of these things in a box. Clear off your entire kitchen counter top and upper cabinets, too. No, it doesn’t really look that nice. It needs to go.

After you have your pile of extras, start boxing it away. I like to keep my boxes per room (bathroom extras), not per category (small appliances). If you mix rooms, it will take longer to unbox the mixed up boxes later. I prepacked and decluttered about 20 boxes worth in both homes I staged recently. This is hard work but selling your house for full price is worth it, right?

Decluttering is the absolute most important part of home staging.

Put a few things back.

Before you tape up your boxes, look at your pile of items and begin to replace the necessities. In our first home, I emptied a drawer of extra dish towels to hold all of my large kitchen utensils like wooden spoons that I used every day because my spoons just didn’t look very nice. But this time around I had a cute little crock and kept them on the counter because they fit in with the decor and made me feel like cooking.

stage a house to sell quickly — Staging a kitchen – In our first home, I emptied a drawer of dishtowels to hold all of my large kitchen utensils like wooden spoons that I used everyday. But this time around I had a cute little crock and kept them on the counter because they fit in with the decor.

Decorate in scenes.

After you put the necessities back out on the counter, you can start the fun part: decorating. I didn’t spend a lot on our decor for home staging. Instead, I got all of my decor items out and put them where I could see them. Then, I went around the house creating vignettes in each room. A vignette is like a little picture-perfect scene that’s part of a bigger picture.

To create a home staging vignette, you want to look at each large piece of furniture or decor in the room as an anchor. You also want to make sure you have enough similar pieces to fill that particular room.

Example: Even though I’m trying to phase teal out of my home decor (the hubs isn’t a fan :/), I have a lot of teal decor items left that I just can’t part with. It was an easy decision to use teal as an accent color throughout the house since it tied each room together, making the house feel more cohesive. I also moved the furniture around the house so that no room had only one type of furniture material (e.g. the black dresser in the foyer came out of my son’s all-wood bedroom so it wouldn’t stand out).

After you have your furniture and accent colors ready, you just build up some height and soften it with some greenery. Pairs are romantic (good for the master bedroom) and 3s or 5s are easy on the eyes. I also tried to have at least one (albeit fake) plant or flower in each room. Each piece of furniture should be a complete, but simple, ensemble.

Don’t forget about your walls. Leaving empty walls can leave a house feeling cold and unloved. And, I’m not going to lie, there were some strategic placements of art that said “Home Sweet Home” and art about embracing possibilities, only one chance, & making life beautiful. Did it make a difference? Probably not, but the wall art definitely softened each room.

Are you feeling like your home decor just doesn’t measure up or you need something extra to freshen up the space? I totally get that, too. We purchased a comforter set (similar to this one) that said “I’m luxurious” to our home shoppers.

If you know you need something but aren’t sure what, check out my post on my favorite home staging necessities.

Hide the ugly.

Let’s be honest. Life isn’t always magazine-worthy, but deep down in there, don’t we all dream of living a mess-free clutter-less life with zero maintenance issues? That ideal is part of what you are selling to potential buyers. “Living here is a breeze. Look, I don’t even have trash.” Yep, you read that right. I even hide the trash can. I also use decor items as an opportunity to hide the imperfections in our home that give it it’s…uhum…character.

Take my steps, for example. (Pardon the hazy photo.)

You think these plants are merely decorative? Think again. The bottom step needs replacing soon. The watering can takes the attention away from where a sliver of a step came off. And that stately boxwood at the top is cleverly (sort-of) concealing a hole we patched in the wall. Tread carefully here, though. You don’t want to draw attention to the flaws. Just pull some of the attention away from the mundane and make the potential buyers’ senses come alive.

Skip the extras.

You want to work in groups of 3’s and keep things simple. You want potential buyers to see the floor and see themselves in the space. You’re selling square footage and the hope of a nice home. If you wouldn’t see a vignette like that in a magazine, skip it. NOTHING is better than something wrong.

I really wanted to make this little entrance more inviting, but I just couldn’t find the right wreath or element to go here (everything at the stores was covered in Easter eggs this time of year), so I just left it alone. It eventually did get a pail of white flowers to hold it open, though.

Clean.

After you get your whole house decluttered and vignetted up, it should be crazy easy to clean. (Want to know why you’ll never buy Mr. Clean Magic Erasers ever again?) There’s always a few more details that need to be taken care of (like those left-over decor items). After you box those up, it’s time to call your Realtor!

If you’re ready for even more step by step help, check out this post for a list of steps to stage your house to sell.

Ask a pro (or at least a friend).

For this month only, I am opening a few free mini home staging consultations! I am offering a free mini-consultation (worth $149) to give you custom advice on what to do with your home.

Which one do you want to be?

I think I know the answer.

I’ve been there. Let me help you.

Sign me up!

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