Getting your home ready for sale can involve major effort and expense. Before you even look into hiring real estate agents, you may have to contend with replacing roofing or fixing code violations.
When it comes to home staging, you might not have a ton of money at your disposal. Here are just a few easy and inexpensive ideas that can help you to stage your home for a speedy sale.
1. Curb Appeal
The average person forms an opinion about your property within just a few seconds of seeing it, so making a good first impression is extremely important. The curb appeal of your property will do just that if you stage it properly.
Homeowners often focus on the interior of the property at the expense of the facade, but you need to get high marks in both areas to ensure a quick sale and even spark a bidding war. So how can you spruce up the front of your home at little expense?
Make sure the landscaping is well-tended, for starters. Mow the lawn, trim overgrown plants, remove dead brush and limbs, and so on. Make sure everything is green and healthy and add a few new flowering plants for pops of color. Then fill any cracks in the driveway or walkways.
Next you can clean up the front of your home. You needn’t paint the whole house, but a fresh coat on the front, including trim and even the front door, could definitely freshen it up. Don’t forget to fix or upgrade light fixtures, house numbers, and the mailbox if necessary. These simple and inexpensive touches can really wow prospective buyers as they see your home for the first time.
2. Deep Clean
There’s just no getting around this essential step when you start the process of staging your home for sale. Even if you stick to a solid cleaning schedule in your house, you don’t always get the ceiling fan blades, the space under the fridge, or other hard-to-reach areas.
Frankly, even the neatest of homeowners will see some buildup of grime on surfaces over time. You need to clean from top to bottom—wipe down walls, steam clean carpets, and so on before you put your home on the market.
Since you need to pull out furniture and personal items and probably paint the interior anyway, the timing is ideal. You can always hire a cleaning crew to help at little expense. A clean home interior can make a huge difference when it comes to impressing buyers.
3. Tub Covers
Most homeowners know that upgrading the kitchen and bathrooms will bring the most bang for their renovating dollars. However, the time and money involved in gutting your bathrooms might be out of the question when you’re looking to sell.
There are a few things you can do on the cheap to make a bathroom look brand new. Paint is a given, as is fixing chips in tile or other minor cosmetic issues. Instead of taking on the major hassle and expense of replacing a grimy, old tub, though, simply install a molded tub cover that hides the tub and outdated tile you’d rather not display.
4. Add Mirrors and Artwork
If you listen to the best estate agents, you know you’re supposed to trim down furnishings to make your space look bigger and remove personal items like photos and tchotchkes so that interested buyers see spaces where their own personal items can live. What you might not know is what you’re supposed to put back in so your home looks complete.
This is where mirrors and artwork come in handy. Mirrors can be placed strategically throughout your home for two purposes: to give the illusion of a larger space and to bounce light into areas that might otherwise appear dim.
As for artwork, it can help to add some color and personality to the space, as well as replace the family photos that might normally stud your walls. Just make sure to pick pleasing, non-offensive art. Maybe leave the Goya’s and Giger’s in storage.
5. Seating Areas
Once you’ve cleared the clutter in your home for the purposes of staging, it’s time to put the rooms in your home back together. As the best Realtor is sure to advise, this step is crucial to giving new owners ideas about how to use the space.
Think about creating a tableau—imagine people in the space, using it to lounge, socialize, or otherwise engage in daily activities. This will help you to stage seating and tables so that others can picture themselves using it and imagine what living in the home might be like.
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