Dress your home for success

You’ve decided to sell your beloved home, you’ve chosen a top agent and set a healthy price. Now it’s time to open your home to potential buyers. Of course you want it to look its best…but how?

Dressing for success is not just for people. With a little thought and planning, your home can be warm, light, and inviting no matter how much mismatched furniture and clutter you live with now. You’ve heard the saying “Less is more,” and that is especially true when preparing your home for market.

Start with knowing that you probably have too much in all your rooms. Whether you have a massive yard sale, donate to charity, or simply rent a storage locker for a few months, you will need to clear out furniture and accessories so that your rooms look as large and inviting as possible.

Once you’ve reduced room contents to a minimum, look at what’s left and think about how you can rearrange or replace items for maximum effect. Not good at interior design? Let your realtor help – after all, we have lots of experience showing houses to their best advantage.

Not long ago I helped “stage” a house and wow, did it make a difference! We treated it like a set for a play or TV show, placing each piece to best advantage. We painted walls and ceiling to open up the rooms with light colors. We haunted discount stores and Goodwill for accent pieces to spark up rooms and add character without breaking the budget. And when we were done, the owners joked that the house looked so nice they might not sell it after all! But by then it was too late – they had several terrific offers to choose from.

Make a little investment at the beginning and get a lot back – now that’s success!