If you know us, you know we love home staging. We think it’s exciting to face the chaotic jumble of a well-lived-in house and figure out what story is buried and waiting to burst out and be told. Usually, we figure that out with some combination of decluttering - or editing as we like to say - cleaning, and design work.
Recently, we were asked by a listing agent to do a staging job that needed even more effort and skill from us. It involved a home that had been in one family for 35 years, but was currently uninhabited. The home had been on the market several times in the past five years with no success. With unprecedented demand in the Berkshires from Coronavirus transplants, one of the grandchildren, a metropolitan property developer, decided they should strike while the real estate iron was hot and re-list the home ASAP.
Here’s a before and after - read on for our staging process.
Problem was, no one lived nearby, nor would they be able to come to the home to take care of the myriad tasks that always need to be done before listing. Editing the house was first thing that needed to be done on the list and the client was interested in “one stop shopping.” In other words, could Staged Ryte handle the project from top to bottom?
Of course we could. We put an inclusive project plan and proposal together covering it all. (If you’d like to read about all of Staged Ryte’s services, click here.)
The house was chock full of family furniture, memorabilia, books, and clothing. Detritus mixed in with family heirlooms--and it was important to know which was which. If we took the job, we would be responsible for making sure those contents were correctly sorted and disposed of. Although daunting, we jumped at the chance to combine our project management expertise with our cleaning/organizing/editing/design skills.
Want to know what we did?
Walk through and assessing the situation.
Step One
Inventory everything. We photographed the entire house--every room, every piece of furniture, every object in each room and shared them with the client. We also did a detailed FaceTime walk-through with the grandson in charge of the sale. We divided the items into three buckets: keep, donate, and throw away. With this particular project time was of the essence and there was no time for an estate sale or other selling option. Normally we would recommend some sort of sale vs pure donation or tossing. Next we divided the keep pile into two smaller categories: store and use for staging.
Honestly, we do it all.
Step Two - Move, Store, Donate, Throw
With the items sorted, we planned to move, store, donate, or throw them out. When sorting the valuable items from junk, it was certainly helpful that one of us could spot a Christofle silver coaster in a pile of reproduction glass because that’s exactly what we found among the collected items in this home. We also saved a valuable Orkney chair that might have otherwise ended up in the junk heap.
Deep cleaning is a MUST.
Step 3 - The Deep, Deep, Deep Clean
This wasn’t an estate sale, but it was a family home that hadn’t been lived in for years. It had the accumulated detritus of 35 multi-generational years of family life plus the grime and dust built up over recent years when no one was living there and maintenance was minimal. Although some might be daunted by this, we were energized by the magnitude of the job. So much so that we did the cleaning ourselves. We think there’s something very satisfying about using your own elbow grease to get rid of that ugly patch of black grime on the floor.
Don’t write to us about Scott standing on the top of the ladder. We know.
Step 4 - Design and Staging
Once the house was cleaned to our standard, it was time to reconstruct it as a livable and welcoming space. We took the pieces we wanted to use from the family’s collection and combined them with pieces we thought fit the spirit and the look of the house and the story we wanted to tell about it. After talking with the client, we knew what we needed to interpret his wishes and create spaces that would appeal to prospective buyers. For example, we knew that a white/neutral pallet wouldn't work with all the beige in the home. Through conversation we were able to advocate for color throughout the home. And voilà! Here’s the finished living room and how it looked before.
Nancy likes to zhuzh.
Step 5--Accepted Offer
The home went on the market on September 21; and was under contract by October 12th for 50K more than the recently sold similar unit.
Same room but staged for how people want to live today: contemporary, clean and cozy.
Do you have a home you’d like to sell that needs staging or a complete reorganization and clean out like this one? We can help. We do discrete staging jobs, soup-to-nuts projects, and everything in between. We work in person or via Zoom or FaceTime.
Contact us at dawn@stagedryte.com for a free consultation about your home.