DEDE BaNkS, ABR®, CRS®
REALTOR®, Stager
Renaissance Realty Partners, Lake Forest, Ill.
www.real-place.com
How long staging: About a year. Has taken an Accredited Staging Professional course. Her first staged house sold to the first buyer who looked at it.
BEST STAGING TIP:
“You’re selling the space, not the owners’ life. So remove photos and collections. Staging is depersonalizing; decorating is personal.”
SPENT:
$250.
PROBLEMS . . .
“It was important to put the ‘living’ back in this room,” Banks says. “There was too much stuff, and there were too many things going on: a music area, a living area, a dining area, and a play area [for the owners’ toddler].”
SOLUTIONS . . .
Make the room’s purpose clear, Banks says, and emphasize its pluses—in this case, the floor, windows, size, and fireplace. Her techniques:
- Reorient the main seating area around the fireplace and set up a smaller reading area.
- Reveal the hardwood floor, hidden under too much stuff, by removing the dining room set and other furnishings. Banks also added an inexpensive white shag rug to make the floor pop.
- Show off the extensive windows and let in light by taking down the curtains.
- Make the fireplace a focal point by painting the wall a rich red and cleaning up errant soot on the mantle.
- Declutter the built-in bookshelves to create openness.
- Make the neutral walls pop by hanging a large, colorful painting—which had been obstructing a window—on a wall in the newly delineated main living space.
OTHER POSSIBILITIES . . .
With more time and money, Banks says, she would have repainted the room to freshen it up. She would also have refinished the floor and added natural-colored window shades that come halfway up the window from the sill. Matzke would have added more greenery and cleaned the windows. To avoid having buyers see the back of the sofa as they enter the room, Callahan says she would have placed the couch facing the wall with the painting. Matzke would have placed the sofa against the wall with the painting to make the room more conducive to conversation. She would also have put a chair alongside the fireplace. Other options, Callahan says, would be to paint only the wall directly above the fireplace to make it pop, and to put the piano where the black leather Eames chair is—that way, people see the piano from the doorway.
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