DIY Home Staging Tips to Sell Your Charlotte Home

When you’re ready to sell your home, you’ll want to get an optimal price on a reasonably efficient timeframe—and staging your home can help you to accomplish both goals.

By removing excess belongings, you’ll have a decluttered environment that allows you to rearrange furniture in eye-catching ways and add attractive touches to your home. The result? A well-staged home that can attract the attention of qualified buyers and may sell more quickly and for more money.

Some sellers hire professional home stagers while others do DIY home staging. To help, here are benefits of home staging and tips for when you decide to do it yourself.

Home Staging Benefits

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), home staging is highly effective. More specifically, 81 percent of buyers’ real estate agents say that this process allows buyers to more easily envision living in the home. They also note how three quarters of sellers saw a 5 to 15 percent increase over their asking price with staged homes and shared an International Association of Home Staging Professionals survey indicating how home staging helps the house to sell three to 30 times faster.

DIY Home Staging Tips

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. When DIY staging a house for sale, NAR considers three rooms the most crucial to optimize the impact:

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

For DIY home staging tips for these important rooms, we look to HGTV.

Living Room

First, ensure that, during decluttering, you remove enough furniture. Professional stagers often take out half of the room’s belongings so prospective buyers can easily inspect fireplaces, built-in bookcases, and so forth; look out all of the windows; and effortlessly walk through the room.

What to avoid: too many pillows on the couch and too many items on the tables. Plus, don’t push furniture up against the walls. Although common wisdom may dictate doing that, saying it makes the room look larger, that isn’t really true. Instead, place your sofa and chairs into conversational groupings with obvious flow patterns. This will create a user-friendly room that actually feels bigger.

Bedrooms

Use simple tricks to create an impression of luxury—like those often used in high-end resorts. Add plush and plump comforters to the beds along with extra blankets, shams, and throw pillows. Clear off your nightstands and use the DIY home staging tips mentioned for the living room to create a more spacious feel.

Kitchen

Pack up small appliances and holiday dishware to declutter storage spaces and use up dry goods in your pantry to make DIY staging easier. Clear off your countertops. As far as cabinets, put on a fresh coat of paint—white or dark neutrals work well—and replace the hardware. Update the backsplash and modernize faucets. Ask your dishwasher’s manufacturer for replacement front panels or use contact paper for a refreshed appearance.

RealSimple.com offers DIY home staging tips that may seem small but can have a big impact:

• Add mirrors. Beside adding touches of style, mirrors’ reflective qualities can make rooms look bigger, which can attract buyers’ interest.
• Replace any outdated window treatments with ones that are “modern and breezy.” This can also help to open up the room and “allow a space to breathe.” To make a room look taller, hang the curtains near the ceiling.
• Put new white towels in your bathroom. This can give it a spa-like appearance that’s “fresh and clean.”

Homes and Gardens.com chimes in with their ideas, which include to give the rooms a feeling of comfort—perhaps allowing potential buyers to imagine themselves watching Netflix movies with their family while lounging on a comfy sofa. Add pops of color to provide touches of personality and to prevent rooms from appearing cold. Live plants can add to a feeling of home as long as you can maintain them well throughout the open house stage. Avoid plastic or otherwise fake flowers.

When Home Showings Are Approaching

Make sure that your lawn is mowed and your landscaping looks attractive. Light candles around the home. Place fresh flowers in strategic locations, and make sure all is well lit. When you think of the sensory appeal of your home, avoid thinking just about the visual. Does everything smell nice and fresh? Do any doors, cabinets, or windows squeak? Incorporate all of your senses when planning your DIY home staging.

In this attractive environment, you can hold open houses to entice qualified buyers and take quality photos and videos of your home to post online and extend your reach.

Mistakes to Avoid When DIY Staging Your Charlotte Home to Sell

Because you can be pretty busy once you make the decision to relocate, it’s easy to wait too long to get started, and you may find yourself needing to quickly stage your home. If that happens, once the home is sufficiently decluttered, ask friends and family for help: with cleaning, minor maintenance and repairs, and painting—and prioritize your efforts on rooms with the biggest impact. Put away personal belongings and remove knick knacks, and then use any remaining time to add little touches that can really add up.

Then, this advice is worth repeating: make sure you remove enough belongings before starting the “DIY staging a house for sale” process. Looking to the professionals, they often remove half.

DIY Home Staging and Our Charlotte Declutter & Store Program

Decluttering is step one of home staging and, through our Charlotte Declutter & Store program, we make it practical to stage your home yourself. Here’s how it works. Our local movers in Charlotte, NC will transport household items of your choosing from your home to our safe and secure storage facility. You’ll then have a decluttered environment for attractive DIY staging and, when you move to your new home, we’ll transport those temporarily stored belongings there.

Are you DIY staging your home for sale? Reach out for a free, no-obligation quote in Charlotte today!