Good news: you’ve hired Stage to Move, you’ve followed all of Kara’s excellent advice, and now your home is stunning and show-ready. You just have one small problem: you love your home’s new interior design so much that you no longer want to move!
Don’t worry—we have the perfect solution for you. Stage your new home! Stage to Move can assist with move-in furniture placement and interior design, helping you get that designer feeling right from the get go. Here are some additional tips for you to stage your home for YOU, not for a buyer:
1. Give every room a role. One stager calls this “minimalism with personality.” Too often, we take unused rooms and use them as storage space, but making these rooms into productive spaces can really make a difference for your home. Keep it simple: transform a small room into a large closet by installing shelves; turn your kids’ former playroom into a basic home gym; make a small bedroom into a home office. The sky is the limit, and by sticking to basics, you won’t feel overwhelmed by the design work involved.
2. Make some much-needed upgrades. You likely remember from your post-college renting days that your apartment never looked so good as the day your lease ended and you handed the keys to the landlord. The prospect of losing hundreds of dollars in security deposits was enough to make you take care of anything that needed fixing—and then some. The same goes for selling your home, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Think your curtains could use a facelift? Invest in some new ones. Furniture looking old and stale? Revamp it, redesign it, or simply remove it and treat yourself to that brand-new sofa you’ve been eyeing for months.
Kara also recommends having a professional organizer arrange your kitchen cabinets and drawers. They have some excellent tricks and skills to help you place things exactly where you need them—without the junk!
3. Work on the first impressions. It’s easy to forget about taking care of the front entrance to your home when you always enter through the back. Walk out into your front yard and take a good, hard look at the front of your house—the door, the mat, the landscape, the paint—and you might be surprised by the little things you hadn’t noticed, such as wood rot or chipped paint. Even if you aren’t selling your home, your guests will likely enter through the front, and you don’t want to neglect the first thing they will see when they arrive at your home.