Do It Yourself: Staging Your Home to Sell

by Mary Ann Romans | More from this Blogger

11 Jan 2007 11:18 AM

In this buyer's market, staging your home may just be the key thing to make it sell quickly and for a good price. Right now, buyers have a lot of homes to choose from, so anything that can give your house an edge in the market is good.

Staging is basically arranging the contents of your house, and doing some cosmetic work on the house, to show the house at its best, There is a whole industry devoted to staging, from certified staging consultants and coordinators, to companies that will rent furniture just for the purpose of staging. A professional home stager can come with a price tag of $5,000-7,000 plus the cost of any additional expenses. The normal price of staging might well be worth the cost by resulting in a quicker house sale and perhaps a higher-priced sale. However, for us, a professional stager is still an expense that we wanted to avoid.

So with our house currently on the market, and our cash flow caught up in a deposit for our future house, we decided to go ahead with a do-it-ourselves staging. We did a lot of research about staging and consulted a few real estate agents who have the experience to tell us what attracts home buyers. Although our staging involved some very minor manual labor, we spent very little money to stage the house. I estimate, we spent less than $200 total. The other aspect we liked, about a do it yourself staging, is the fact that we could do things gradually and still have the house available for showings.

Now that the house is being shown, we usually get the highest showing ratings, which means our house looks great to potential buyers. Also, agents who have shown the house have given very positive comments.

There is a lot to know about staging. You can stage just one room or the entire house and grounds. It is really up to you and your budget and your time.

In future blogs, I will share basic guidelines we observed for staging, plus some simple techniques for staging specific rooms, such as the kitchen, dining room, family room, bedrooms and more.

Mary Ann Romans writes for the Frugal Living Blog here at Families.com. Click Here to see more of her articles.

Related Articles:

Before You Have an Open House

Staging Extremes

Learn more about Mary Ann Romans

Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, the kids and a 16-pound cat.

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Sheron Cardin (25) 11 Jan 2007 09:28 PM

Hello Mary Ann, Your post caught my eye in google alerts and I had to pursue it because I too am a do-it-yourself person. Your research on home staging served you well. You were lucky to have found enough real estate agents to help you. But for the many who do not know where to begin and I highly recommend staging yourself...they could visit a website that specializes in do-it-yourself home staging and they explain every detail from a decorator's point of view. All they have to do is log onto www.how2homestage.com and they will find helpful tools to figure paint and room arrangements and they even have a shopping mall to buy slipcovers and stuff like that. Thank you for your post.

Mary Ann Romans (26876) 12 Jan 2007 04:52 AM

Thank you for the tip! Have you staged a home recently?