Make Your House Stand Out: 6 Easy Tips for Staging Your Home Before Putting It on the Market

The average American will move over 11 times in the course of their lives. With this much wanderlust ingrained into our culture, knowing how to sell a house has become an important skill.

The most important part of real estate occurs before the house even goes on the market. Selling any house means knowing how to stage it.

Staging your home means cleaning it and making it as attractive as possible before allowing buyers to see it. However, this isn't quite as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of little ways to mess it up.

The good news is that there are also several tips to make things easier, and we'll tell you more about those in the paragraphs below.

1. Update: Don't Replace

It may be tempting to get rid of anything that looks, dingy, dated, or otherwise not at its best. However, this can take up a lot of your time, not to mention money. That's why it's better to revitalize rather than replace if you can.

While putting down newly tiled floors might improve the look of your home, painting the tiles will do the same thing. Also, instead of buying a new dining room set, why not refinish the wood on the old one?

2. Clean Everything

In many cases, breathing new life into something is as easy as grabbing a sponge and a bucket of water. It's a fact of life that things get dirty, and in a lot of cases, we just get used to it being that way. For instance, we vacuum our carpets every once in a while, but when's the last time we looked under our bed?

The average house today is well over 2,000 square feet, and that number keeps getting bigger. All the extra space in our home means more to clean, so it makes sense that we might not have time for all of it. Staging our home is one of the times in our life where we have to make time, though not all in one day.

3. De-personalize

If you've ever looked for a new house, chances are you've noticed that most places seem pretty bare. This is because the homeowners have taken out the personal elements. The point of a walk-through is to try to see yourself in the space, so it doesn't make sense if somebody else's stuff is there.

Taking away personal elements doesn't end at taking family portraits off the walls, though. It can include things you wouldn't otherwise think of, like paint colors and tile patterns.

In theory, your buyer could be anyone, which is why the various spaces within the house shouldn't look too childish, feminine, or masculine. If you can't de-personalize everything, it's understandable, but you should do what you can.

4. Add More Light

While nobody wants to be blinded, more light is a good idea in most cases. Between electric bills and simple convenience, we may not keep the place particularly bright. After all, it's far easier to keep lights until they go out than it is to replace dimming bulbs.

Sunlight is another selling point that we don't often take into account. While bright beams of sunlight can make a space happier, it can also cause a glare on the TV or wake us up earlier than we planned.

Sunlight can also warm up the house, which isn't always fun if you live somewhere like Hawaii or Texas. In fact, the weather might even be one of the reasons you're moving away. You can read more about that here.

5. Move the Furniture

There's nothing wrong with keeping your furniture around during a showing. In fact, it may even help things.

The big rule is that accessibility should always come first. If you have to move furniture so that people can get around the house easier then so be it.

Ease of access isn't the only reason to move around furniture, though. You can also use it to add energy and purpose to an otherwise boring space. Maybe that bare stretch of carpet under the stairs could fit a small desk and chair.

That bare wall that once housed all your photos might make a good spot for a bookshelf or that old recliner that you never found a use for.

6. Take Care of the Exterior

Staging your home is about more than showing the inside. Even outdoor factors can turn off a potential buyer. If some of the plants in your flowerbed are dying, they should be replaced.

Also, make sure the lawn is mowed, the leaves are raked, and that all pests are cleared. There's nothing more unsettling than walking up to a house and seeing a wasp's nest under the mailbox.

That being said, things like bird feeders and baths might make things more appealing, so don't get rid of those if you have them.

Things to Consider When Staging Your Home

There's a lot to keep in mind when staging your home. You'll need to make the place as clean and fresh-looking as possible while also not trying to pander to any one type of person. This includes outside the house as well as in.

The place should be bright and accessible so that any potential buyer can see themselves making the most of their new space and leading a happy life there. There's a lot more advice out there, and even a few different schools of thought when it comes to staging a home. We encourage you to do more research if you're interested.

If you want more health, fashion and lifestyle advice, please visit our site. On the subject of homes, maybe you want your place to be a little more natural. We can help.