Successful Staging

We had a very fruitful meeting with our stager, Karen, on Wednesday evening. After looking around a bit, she complimented our decorating taste and then went on to explain the difference between decorating and staging. As I mentioned before, I de-cluttered quite a bit before she came in, but I learned there was much more to do. I knew a large part of staging is to make everything more spacious, but I didn't understand that it was okay (and necessary) to sacrifice some of the decorating in the process. We didn't quite have the right balance yet. I felt a little overwhelmed with the list she left us, but our realtor, CJ, said Karen usually takes a day to compile the list of "to dos" for her clients. She was able to generate ours before she left our house, so I told myself we got off easy.

We worked extra hard on Thursday and Friday evening getting everything crossed off our staging list. We wanted to be ready for the photographer who is coming Saturday to take pictures for the websites and the virtual tour. When Karen was here she took "before" pictures and she'll come back next week to take some "afters." I think she will post them all on her site later, so I'll put up a link here if she does. It should be interesting to see the difference.