Selling your home can be an overwhelming process. Among the multitude of details you must handle during this transition, one of the most important is worrying about attracting high-quality offers for your home through interior design and staging.
The first step is thinking about color scheme. It’s usually best to remove wallpaper and stick to solid colors. Paint main walls with a base color and mix it 50% lighter for some accents (like an accent wall) and 150% darker for other accents, like window trims. Use this color family throughout your whole home. Never paint the ceiling anything but white.
Don’t get carried away with room themes. Utilize pillows, vases, and other decorations that fit your color scheme to tie rooms together instead. Pillows should always come in twos or more. Lighter colors, large mirrors, and vertical lines can also help the space appear larger. Glass shower doors, bright lights, and a large mirror will visually enlarge any bathroom.
Keep an eye on furniture proportions. Don’t crowd small spaces with large pieces. A good rule of thumb for choosing furniture is a 2.3 ratio. Choose a sofa that is 2/3 the length of the space it sits in and then a coffee table 2/3 the length of the sofa. Rugs have special criteria and should be sized either: large enough for all the furniture to sit on it, or for each piece of furniture to fit halfway on, no smaller.
Next, turn your attention to the lighting. Use lamps and mirrors to provide even light coverage in each room. Try to reduce or eliminate dark corners. When possible, point lamps strategically to highlight a room’s best feature, like the hand-carved fireplace mantle or the kitchen backsplash.
Create focal points in major rooms to make a statement, a large painting does this job wonderfully. When hanging art, the center of the piece should always be 57” above the floor. Let the room dictate the furniture placement, don’t try to force furniture into a setup that’s not practical.
Make a display of the well-appointed bar, guests will feel more comfortable serving themselves and this will ease them into the feeling space is their own.
Throughout the process, remind yourself that the goal of staging is to have your home appeal to all kinds of visitors. Removing personal items and sentimental keepsakes will go a long way towards allowing buyers to picture themselves living in the space.
Bell Real Estate Photography
