DIY Home Staging: Selling Your Tampa Home

When it’s time to sell your house, you’ll want to attract qualified buyers and optimize the offers you receive—and here’s a time-tested method to maximize success: home staging. This involves removing excess belongings from your house so that you can attractively arrange the remaining belongings and add enticing decorating touches to appeal to potential buyers.

Home staging can help your home to sell more quickly and for more money. Once you decide to use this tactic to get the most of your home’s sale, options include hiring a professional home stager or DIY home staging.

Benefits of Home Staging

Home staging can be extremely effective. In fact, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 81 percent of buyers’ real estate agents said that staging a home helps buyers to imagine a property as their future home. In a NAR article, they note how 75 percent of sellers saw an increased return on investment over asking price—from 5 to 15 percent—while a survey from the International Association of Home Staging Professionals shows that staging helps homes to sell three to 30 times more quickly.

If you decide to take advantage of this powerful strategy by doing it yourself, here are DIY home staging tips.

DIY Staging a House for Sale

First, to prioritize your efforts, NAR lists three rooms as the most important for maximum impact:

• Living room (39 percent)
• Primary bedroom (36 percent)
• Kitchen (30 percent)

HGTV offers DIY home staging tips for each of these key areas.

For the living room, make sure you’ve removed enough furniture. Professional home stagers often remove half of the belongings so that potential buyers can easily move around the room, inspect features such as fireplaces and built-in architectural details, and look out the windows. Avoid putting too many items on your coffee table or too many pillows on your sofa.

Although common wisdom may say that pushing your furniture against the walls makes the room look bigger, that isn’t true. What’s preferable: placing your couch and armchairs into “cozy conversational groups” with obvious traffic flow patterns. Besides making the room seem larger, it will be more user friendly.

With bedrooms, think luxury. This can be as simple as plush and plump comforters that can resemble what’s used in high-end resorts. Add shams, extra blankets, and throw pillows—and remove personal items from nightstands. When DIY staging your bedrooms, remember the strategies used to enhance the living room.

When DIY staging your home to sell, update your kitchen by packing up small appliances and dishware you won’t use to show off your decluttered storage spaces. Use up food items in your pantry to accomplish the same purpose. Remove countertop clutter, paint your cabinets with a dark neutral or classic white, update the cabinet hardware and kitchen backsplash, and modernize the faucets. Look into dishwasher replacement panels or use contact paper to give the appliance the appearance of stainless steel.

Another source of great DIY home staging tips is RealSimple.com. Seemingly small strategies that can have a larger impact include using mirrors to add stylish touches and to benefit from their reflective qualities to enhance the size of rooms.

When you replace outdated window treatments, you have the opportunity to use modern, breezy ones that also open up space; when curtains are hung near the ceiling, rooms can look taller. Also, white towels in the bathroom can give the room a spa-like appearance, so include fresh, new ones.

Other helpful ideas come from Homes and Gardens.com, and these focus on giving your home an ambience of comfort. Make it easy for prospective buyers to imagine themselves lounging in comfy chairs while watching their favorite shows. Avoid a too-cold feeling by adding pops of color and personality, which can include live, well-kept plants; don’t use plastic or other obviously fake flowers.

As Home Showings Approach

Ensure that you’ve got curb appeal with attractive landscaping and mown grass before any open houses. Strategically place fresh flowers, light candles, and otherwise make sure that the home is well lit. Don’t focus on just the visual elements of the home, though. Double check that everything smells nice and fresh; that doors, windows, and cabinets don’t squeak when opened; and so forth. Consider all of the senses while DIY home staging.

In this eye-catching environment, you can take quality photos and videos of your home and use them online and elsewhere to extend your marketing reach. You can also hold open houses with confidence.

DIY Staging Your Home to Sell: Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t wait too long to get started. If, while you’re busy with other aspects of your relocation plans, you find yourself short of time and need to quickly stage, here are ideas. First, sufficiently declutter your home; that’s the foundation of staging. Then, reach out for help from friends and family. Ask them to assist in cleaning, doing minor maintenance and repairs, and painting.

This means removing knick knacks and personal belongings. Then, put your focus on ways to create the largest impact as described in tips provided above. If you have extra time, add the little touches that can make a big difference.

For all of this to go smoothly, it’s vital that you remove enough belongings in the decluttering stage of the “DIY staging a house for sale” process.

DIY Home Staging and Our Tampa Declutter & Store Program

With our Tampa Declutter & Store program, you’ll benefit from safe, secure, convenient, and affordable storage of your excess household items and a seamlessly decluttered home environment that’s ideal for home staging.

First, our Tampa local movers will remove household belongings of your choice and transport them to our storage facility. Then, in your decluttered environment, you can arrange furniture and enhance your decor for maximum effect.

Keep these belongings in storage for precisely the amount of time you require, and we’ll transport them to your new home when you’re ready. Reach out for a free, no-obligation quote in Tampa today!