Moving Tips: How to Stage Your Home

As I shared here and here, we're gearing up to move into a new home.  Which means we have to sell our condo.  Which means we have to foray into the world of home staging.  Oy.

I'm not an avid HGTV watcher, so I don't have hours of programming under my belt to guide me through this process.  But I have come across some very worthy advice from family, friends, and our agent that we have put into practice for when the house goes on the market this weekend.

4 Home Staging Tips:

1.  Enter the Witness Protection Program: Well, act as if you were.  Take down all photos of yourself, your friends, family, dogs, cats, even the guy whose picture came in that pretty frame you bought.  That lets people feel like they're walking into their house--not visiting yours.

2.  Remember the Principle of Threes:  This is a design principle that shows up in home decor and restaurant plate presentation alike--for whatever reason, three (or odd numbers larger than three) is a pleasing number of objects for the human eye to take in.  So if you're displaying objects on, say, a mantle, choose three.

3.   Go with the Flow:  look at the doorways that take you from one room into the next.  Are they clear of clutter, furniture, stacks of books/magazines?  People get a vibe of space or crowdedness for a room based on how easy it was to enter it.  We're removing an ottoman from our living room because it juts out into the doorway a little bit, and it opens up that space a lot.

4.  Clear Your Clutter...Or At Least Organize It:  Staging is really another word for "pre-packing," and a tremendous opportunity to clear out clutter that you don't want, need, or plan to use in your new home.  But what about those "clutter" items that you want to keep but don't want to display in your staged home?  Pack them in boxes, and stash 'em in the basement, attic, or storage closets.  Your stuff is allowed to stay...as long as it's organized.  That way, prospective buyers think, "wow, look how much storage you can get into this basement!" rather than "where's all their stuff...do real people live here?"

More staging tips?  Please share yours!

(image via: http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/real_estate/archives/2008_07.html)