The style of furniture and where it is placed can drastically change the view of a room.
Selling a house is all about appealing to the potential buyer’s needs and wants. One way to do is by staging furniture in order to assist the potential buyer in picturing his or her life there. Plus, by staging your home effectively, you can often capture a greater sale price. Relying on word of mouth, email, or websites is not enough. Staging furniture is a marketing tool you can’t afford to skip.
We’re sharing 4 tips for staging furniture wisely here!
1. It’s all about each specific room.
Consider each room separately. Look at the size of the room and identify it’s main purpose.
If the size is large enough for multiple pieces of furniture, start with the largest piece. This will help ensure that the room won’t look cluttered or ill-designed.
If the room is a family room, then make sure the furniture is sturdy enough to account for kids playing, pets, and daily use.
And finally, make sure that the color palate makes sense with the materials already used in the room. The stone fireplace shouldn’t clash with the color or even material of the sofa or coffee table.
2. Flow and symmetry matter.
Depending on the function of the room, how you enter and exit matters. Potential buyers do not want to have to negotiate their way around furniture that is blocking an easy way to the kitchen or the patio door.
Nor should you impede the view of focal points (i.e.: fireplace, picturesque view). Seating and furniture should aid people in enjoying these features.
Staging furniture requires you to consider how a person would instinctively walk through space. Interrupting a natural flow can cause tension and keep the potential buyer from imagining their daily life in that space.
Another way to avoid creating tension for your potential buyer is to aim for symmetry.
When placing pillows on sofas, adding side tables, or plants, work in teams of two. This helps create a fuller composition, is easy on the eyes, and naturally, works to put potential buyers at ease.
This helps create a fuller composition, is easy on the eyes, and naturally, works to put potential buyers at ease.
3. It’s not about you.
You want you the potential buyer to envision their life in your house. So staging furniture should not represent your life in the house.
This is best accomplished by using neutral and lighter color shades. And this isn’t just for wall colors. Love red? Use it in two throw pillows on the bed, not for the bedspread.
You will also need to depersonalize the space. When staging furniture this means taking out the possibly ill-matching, much much-loved desk from your great-grandmother.
Most likely the style and materials used are not akin to the style and materials used in the rest of the room. Picturing one’s life somewhere new requires a smooth palate where their imagination can safely dream.
4. Encourage their dreaming.
Moving into a new house is exciting and marks a new beginning. New beginnings let people put their dreams into action.
Set the table for a romantic dinner. Put out a board game in progress on the coffee table to suggest family game night. Place fresh fruit in a basket in the kitchen to spark ideas of cooking. Add a couple of plants in the office to enliven the energy.
If your house can elicit dreaming, you’re ahead of the game.
