I just finished staging our home for photos to sell it! We are currently looking for our forever home in Colorado, and so we are just getting this one ready to hit the market once we find it! It was an exhausting couple of weeks trying to get this place ready for pictures. If you have kids, you know it’s impossible to keep it clean. They literally go around making messes faster than I can clean them up. But Daniel was able to take them out to do things a few times, so that I could really declutter, paint, and decorate! I purchased a few things to help with the staging, and really tried to use what we already had.
From doing my research and looking at houses, good staging makes such a difference. We looked at a few houses this past week in the same neighborhood. One home was staged beautifully (and painted!), and it flew off the market in a a weekend. The other homes have been sitting for 1 week to over a month! This first house was maybe a little nicer, but not by a lot!
The first step was to paint our bedroom.
It was the same red color as when we moved in. I had added white sample splotches, but then that’s where I stopped. Finishing the paint made a huge difference in this room! It feels so much larger and brighter. The color I used is the same one as in the bathroom, and it’s called In Our Stars by Sherwin Williams. This is a room without the best light, so this is essential! I decluttered the closet a little, but overall this room wasn’t really a cluttered space. I added new, clean white bedding, a throw pillow and some art. The other addition that made a big difference is the addition of curtains. These were a last minute addition, so we used the 84″ panels that we took down in the living room. They are a few inches too short which makes me cringe, but having the fabric on the walls just helps to finish off the space!
Staging the Bathroom
Not much to really do here! I took all of our products off the counter and out of the shower, cleaned like crazy, and hung fresh new white towels on the hooks.
The living room is my least favorite place in our house, decor wise.
It just has never come together the way I want it to. We had a rug with lots of blues and really bright turquoise blues that just weren’t working. I took the rug from our front room/playroom and moved it down here to have more of a neutral feel. I replaced the chair with a more modern chair. This chair was from Walmart and only $134! It’s not a chair you’ll want to sit for hours by any means, but it fills an empty corner, and beats what we had there!
The blackout curtains that were in here were just too bulky and dark for this space. This is another area in the house that doesn’t get the best light, and these curtains compounded that. The blackout just made more sense in a bedroom as well. I added a lighter throw blanket, moved unsued art from the basement up (the green and blue in the art ties together the green from the bathroom cabinets to the blue in the stairs to the basement!), and added some simple coffee table decor.
Staging the Kitchen
My cabinets were bursting at the seams when I finished the kitchen and dining area from all of the items that were removed for pictures and shoved in the cabinets!
Small items and appliances on counters always look cluttered in photos, so all of our normal things got removed. I left the coffee maker with a pretty canister next to it, a wood utensil holder, and a charcuterie board with a plant a couple of cute bottles. These little vignettes warm the kitchen while still feeling clean and styled.
We have a white IKEA dining table with with chairs. Pair that with the gray floors and white kitchen cabinets and light gray counters, and it can look pretty washed out. I’ve been wanting to do something with our table for a while or get new chairs, but that just wasn’t in the cards right now. My solution to keep it budget friendly – add chargers and colorful plates! Throughout the house, I have used a lot of the sagey green color, so this another way to tie in the color.
Side note on staging – it always looks the best when one color is chosen to run through the whole house OR to just keep everything neutral. I chose green to pull the cabinetry color in the bathroom throughout the house.
Ok, now for the hard one – staging the playroom.
Which is located in the front of the house, as soon as you walk through the door. And it is packed full of toys. There were a couple of ways I could have gone in this room. One is to make it a formal dining room. With it being carpeted though, I didn’t like this idea. The next was to make it a sitting room/formal living area. The third idea, which is the one I went with because we had the furniture and it was sustainable for us (because we do still live here) is to show it as an office/playroom.
I cleaned up and cleared out a lot of the bigger toys, broken toys, toys that just don’t get played with all that often. I moved my desk back upstairs, and rearranged the other furniture pieces – the bench and the toy chest. I added new cube storage boxes to the bench, switched up art, and re styled the bookshelves! Perfect by no means, but a million times better!
After all this work, we had like twenty something showings and were under contract in just a few days of listing! Now on to the next adventure – packing and moving!
For the Pinners
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