Before you ever put your Waterloo Region home on the market for sale, you do have to make sure it is ready for the spotlight. Home staging is something that you will hear, and read, a lot about if you go looking for advice for home sellers and home selling in general. While it does not mean that you have to become an interior designer overnight or hire one, it does mean that your home needs to look as good as it possibly can in order to attract as many potential buyers to it as possible.
The first step to staging your home successfully for viewing by potential buyers is to actually take a step back and look at your home objectively as if you were seeing it for the first time. A well-staged home has to be one that buyers could picture themselves living in, so the first step in home staging is simply to take some steps to depersonalize it, at least to a certain extent.
Removing almost all your family photos is a must for the home seller. By doing so you take some of the stamp of ownership off your home, making it easier for a potential buyer to imagine themselves living there.
The one exception to this rule might be if you have pictures of you and your family enjoying a certain feature of the home that may be difficult to see right now, such as a great deck or patio in the summer when the home is being shown in the dead of winter and the deck itself is barely visible. By doing this you will be offering potential buyers a visual glimpse at the real potential of your home.
To prevent the home from looking too bare once all of the photos are gone, replace them with some ‘generic’ but attractive art prints. As landscapes are very neural and most discount stores carry them at very inexpensive prices one or two of those should do just fine and won’t put a huge dent in your home selling budget.
Then there is your overall home decor. You may love the whimsical cat curtains that hang in your bathroom. Or the bright purple carpet in your bedroom. They may not be to everyone’s taste but they work for you. However, that is the problem, they may not be to everyone’s taste. And when it comes to successful home selling everything must appeal to the buyer, not the seller.
In order to have your home appeal to as many potential buyers as possible neutralize your decor. That means paint walls a neutral color, replace those whimsical window treatments with nice plain blinds and do something about that purple carpet, which at the moment may distract (and annoy) people so much that they fail to properly take in the rest of your beautiful home.