Minnesota Realtor serving Blaine, Forest Lake, Ham Lake, Hugo, Lino Lakes,  White Bear Lake, Wyoming and surrounding areas.

The First Stage In Home Staging: One You Can Do Yourself

"Home staging" was coined by Barb Schwarz back in the early '70s, and the concept has become well known as "house fluffing," "dressing to sell," and "home presentation" to name a few, but the concept has not taken hold among home owners when selling a home because many people do not understand the idea or cannot create a workable plan for staging their home correctly.

The focus of staging is to make a home more marketable by creating the most appealing home to the greatest number of prospective buyers. It should be impersonal enough not to infringe on a buyer's own sense of style.

One of the very first things a homeowner can and should do to begin the staging process is to get rid of clutter:

1. Piles of stuff with no home
2. Unorganized closets, cabinets, and drawers
3. Too much on shelves, tabletops, and mantels
4. Furniture that makes a room feel cramped or doesn’t allow flow

1. Start in one room and finish that room before moving on. Consider closets a room.
2. Get together four boxes. Label them the following way:
    

1. Put Away: Keep in the room, but find a new home
2. Storage: Keep but put into storage
3. Relocate: Put in its proper place
4. Resell/Give Away: Good enough to sell or give away but no longer needed
5. Trash
    

3. Start on one wall and move to the right putting any “clutter” as defined above into one of the five boxes.
4. Once you have gone through a room, immediately take care of the five piles. Find the proper home for all items in the “put away box.” Put the “storage” items into your storage containers and remove them to the storage location. Put items away that belong in other areas of your house. Throw out the trash. And finally, deal with the resell/give-away pile.

You may end up putting the resell/give away pile in a specific location until you have finished decluttering. Nonetheless, you need to decide what you plan to do with this pile. If you are going to sell the items at a garage sale, the best thing is to set a date. If there are some pieces that you plan to sell through the classifieds, call them immediately!

But what about the stuff that you want to give away? The easiest thing to do is to find out what organizations in your area pick up items. Such organizations often include Goodwill, The Salvation Army, veteran’s associations, and other local organizations.

Another good way to get rid of items you no longer need is to use Freecycle. (Go to www.freecycle.org to find a freecycle group in your area.) Here, you can list items you no longer need and then choose someone from a list of takers. The best part is the person wanting the items comes to your home on your timetable to get them.

Once you have completed the first room, you can move onto the next. Don’t feel as if you have to do this all in one day. In fact, it is better to spend an hour a day over a 2-week period. In this way, you won’t feel stressed by the process.

The final decluttering step is to call your local professional home stager. They can help you take your newly decluttered home and turn it into a showcase that is ready to sell faster and for more money.

Good luck!

Teri B Clark is a professional writer and published author. Her most recent book, 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought, explains these tips in more detail and offers many, many others. To learn more about Teri's latest book, visit http://staging-your-home.blogspot.com