December is a tough month to sell a house. This year in particular, as homes languish longer on the market, it seems even harder to find a buyer.
One way to make a house stand out is to "stage" it for sale. Home staging is an interior decorating technique that aims to make a house look inviting to buyers and neutral enough so they can envision living there.
We asked some local home stagers to offer their expert advice to do-it-yourselfers, and to bring us behind the scenes on their own staging projects.
Filling an empty townhouse
The owner of this new Beverly townhouse has been trying since last spring to sell the unit in its empty, pristine new condition. Before taking another price reduction, he decided to hire Donna Caselden of Staged for Sale in North Andover to give it a more appealing look.
PROBLEM: Potential buyers aren't sure which part of the open floorplan is the dining room and which is the living room, let alone imagining the possibilities for the little kitchen space near the door to the deck.
SOLUTION: Caselden rented furniture and tapped into her own warehouse of small pieces to furnish the space. She chose just enough furniture to suggest a use for each space without cluttering the area.
She chose a round dining table to highlight the bay window and put a little bistro table near the deck. The furnishings are contemporary, she said, because the buyer is likely to be a young single person or young couple.
PROBLEM: The seller doesn't want any holes in the wall because he's afraid any little blemish could be a liability. That means Caselden couldn't hang any artwork.
SOLUTION: Caselden arranged the sofa at an angle so she could use a tree as the focal point behind it rather than a print. To hang window treatments without creating nail holes in the wall, her crew used fishing line and tacks.
PROBLEM: Some of the nicest features of the townhouse, such as the hardwood floors and granite countertops, were difficult to highlight.
SOLUTION: Caselden kept the decor sparse. She avoided using rugs so the floors would stand out. She used a minimum of decorations in the kitchen, just enough so it doesn't look bare.
Bathroom and bedroom fix
This Windham, N.H., home was rearranged and prepared for sale by a team of local stagers, including Sabrina Londrigan of Stillwaters Staging and Design in Hampstead, N.H. The home was on the market for nearly a year before it was staged, Londrigan said. After the work was done, under the direction of Stayci Fast of New England Home Staging, it sold in about a week.
PROBLEM: Usually a stager's job is to put away decorations and knickknacks, but in this case, the bathroom was underdecorated, Londrigran said. The room looked boring and uninviting.
SOLUTION: First, the stagers cleaned up the little details the owners overlooked, such as the curling iron left out and the shampoo bottles in the shower area.
"People look at the shampoo and they don't see the fact that there's glass doors or whatever," Londrigan said. "They don't focus on the right thing."
They added a floral arrangement to draw the eye to the room. Their goal was to make the bathroom look like a spa, Londrigan said. They hung clean towels, and rather than leave the jacuzzi tub bare, they decorated it with ivy.
PROBLEM: The bathroom and bedroom had an empty, echo-y feeling, which is not appealing to potential buyers, Londrigan said.
SOLUTION: The stagers put down matching rugs they found elsewhere in the house. The rugs absorbed some of the echo and made the rooms feel more comfortable. The stagers found a warmer color of bedding in the homeowner's linen closet. They turned the bed to face the door so the pillows face you as you walk in the room. They took clutter off the dressers and softened the windows with curtains.
Cluttered storage room
Carolyn Lafferty, a home stager with Images of Home - Interior Redesign, took on the storage room in this West Boxford home to make it more appealing to potential buyers. The family had lived in the home for about 30 years, she said, and the children had grown and moved out. This particular room was used for storage.
PROBLEM: All the colors of the carpeting and the walls were outdated.
SOLUTION: "I told (the owner) that the carpeting would definitely need to come up," Lafferty said. "I asked her what was underneath it. It was beautiful hardwood floors."
Lafferty had the green carpet removed and the yellow walls painted a neutral white. She chose calming blues and neutral beige for the accessories.
PROBLEM: The potential buyer can't envision what they could do with this awkwardly shaped room.
SOLUTION: Lafferty found two twin beds in the house and pushed them together to make one large bed, and covered it with a new bedspread. She took the hutch top off the bureau in the room and set it up as a dresser with a little greenery on top. In the little nook under the window, she set up an office space.
Modernizing a condominium
Taniya Nayak, a University of Massachusetts-Lowell graduate, is host of the Washington, D.C., version of "Designed to Sell" on HGTV. For each episode, she has a budget of $2,000 in materials to get the home that's having trouble selling staged for sale.
This Virginia condominium, which Nayak and her team recently staged, will appear on air this season, but Nayak offered to give our readers a preview.
PROBLEM: The fireplace didn't stand out as the focal point of the living room.
SOLUTION: Nayak's crew painted the wooden frame black to make the white marble stand out and catch the eye.
PROBLEM: Some of the furniture was outdated. The coffee table, for example, had a nice retro style but was worn out.
SOLUTION: The stagers replaced some furniture, such as the dining room table and chairs, and updated other pieces. The coffee table got a new life with two cans of black spray paint.
PROBLEM: The kitchen looked out-of-date and cramped.
SOLUTION: The stagers removed a cabinet over the peninsula.
"It's storage space, but it's hard to reach storage space, so we just removed it," Nayak said. "It opened up the whole space of the kitchen and the dining room."
To add back some storage space, they elongated and widened the peninsula. Then to update the look, they sanded down and repainted the cabinets, replaced the knobs with stainless steel hardware, and installed pendant lights and new appliances.
Laminate countertops look cheap, Nayak said, but they didn't have thousands of dollars to spend on solid granite so they took a shortcut. For about $440, they bought black granite tiles and used those on the counters instead.
PROBLEM: The dining room furniture was too large for small condo space.
SOLUTION: The staging crew replaced the existing table with a smaller but taller one to highlight the high ceilings. Nayak set the table to give the potential buyer a vision of having people over and entertaining.
Staging tips from the pros
* Start at the doorway: The buyer is going to stand at each doorway and decide in a split-second whether or not to enter, said Sabrina Londrigan of Stillwaters Staging and Design in Hampstead, N.H. Do they have a clear path to enter? Is there something that catches their attention and draws them in?
* Declutter and depersonalize: Let your furniture have breathing room, Londrigan said. Pack up or throw away as much clutter as you can. Keep only the things you need to function while you're trying to sell.
Colleen Flanagan, a North Andover stager and Realtor, asks clients, "What can you live without while your home is on the market?"
* Family photos: Some stagers say all personal photos must go. Carolyn Lafferty of Images of Home makes an exception to that rule for the occasional well-placed black-and-white family photo. Black-and-white photos are timeless and fit with contemporary or traditional decor.
"It lends warmth and personality to the room," she said. "It lends history."
* Quick floor fix: If your linoleum floor is in terrible condition and you don't want to put much money into it, cover it up with sticky-backed squares of carpeting, Lafferty said.
* Paint judiciously: Painting is the cheapest way to change the look of a room, but you don't have to do it unless the wall color is terribly out of date, Lafferty said. If you choose not to paint, though, you must at least fill in nail holes and cracks in the wall. Potential buyers notice holes, and it gives the impression that the house needs work.
* Examine your hardware: Are your kitchen cabinet knobs worn out or mismatched? Replace them with neutral stainless steel hardware to spruce it up, said Taniya Nayak, host of "Designed to Sell" on HGTV.
* Rent furniture: If you're selling a home that's empty, consider doing what the pros do. You can rent furniture by the month, as well as artwork, plates and other interior decorating supplies. It may be expensive - roughly $1,200 to $1,500 - but you need to weigh that against the cost of paying the mortgage for several more months because the house won't sell, Nayak said.
* Rearrange furniture: Sometimes the best way to get a fresh look at the furniture you already own is to take it all out of the room and put it back one piece at a time, said Donna Caselden of Staged for Sale in North Andover. Londrigan said she likes to set up a bedroom so can see the bed and pillows when you first walk in the door.
* Don't ignore odor: You may not notice the smell of your own house, but it if you do a lot of cooking, for example, it may smell like garlic, Londrigan said. Get someone objective to give you an honest opinion and if there's an odor, get rid of it. Clean the rugs. Do what you need to do. Buyers notice.
* Basic design rules apply: Always decorate in odd numbers (three candles or one plant on the mantel, etc.). Aim for three sources of light in any room, ideally in a triangular pattern.
* Put clear, not frosted, bulbs in your lamps, Lafferty suggests, and use 40-watt bulbs. This gives you clear, crisp lighting but without the overly bright glare of 75-watt bulbs. The place for bright lights is hallways and stairs where safety is critical.
How much should I spend?
Staging a home can be as cheap as the cost of painting supplies or as expensive as thousands of dollars in materials and labor fees.
There is no specific guideline for exactly how much to spend to maximize your profits on the house, the stagers say. The best rule is to spend as little as possible, while addressing the major issues that will detract from the value of the house.
For about $200 to $300, a professional home stager will do a consultation and give you a list of suggestions on how to stage the house yourself. If you choose to hire a professional to do the work, the price will probably be at least $1,500 depending on the size of the house and the amount of work it needs.
You can find a directory of local stagers through the Internation Association of Home Staging Professionals at www.iahsp.com.
Selling during the holidays
If you are trying to sell your house this month, you should keep your holiday decorations simple.
"Holiday decorations can be very warm," said stager Carolyn Lafferty. "Just keep the clutter down. If you have 50 boxes of d…cor and you have every little ornament your child made for school, keep it in the box this year and just go with simple decorations."
Also, keep overtly religious symbols to a minimum, no matter what your affiliation is, said Taniya Nayak, host of HGTV's "Designed to Sell."
"This is generally the case whether it's a holdiay season or not," Nayak said. "You generally don't want to have a lot of religious symbols around the house. ... It's very similar with not having too many personal photos up. When someone has tons of family pictures aroumd the house, you feel like it's their house, not like it could be your house."
