5 Easy Ways To Stage Your Home On A Budget

These five tips for getting your home ready to sell are both easy and affordable.

Getting ready to sell your home can both be an exciting and stressful time. You may be excited to start a new adventure but sad about leaving all the memories you’ve made in your current home and worried about all those people walking through your home. I had all those feelings and more when we sold our home. Luckily we only had our house on the market for 3 days before we got an offer (and accepted it). I give credit to our realtor but also the work we did prior to listing our house. We didn’t do a lot of work but it did make all the difference in the showings. Here are five ways we staged our home that really helped make our house desirable to many.

Stay Neutral: This is the only thing you may need to spend money on when getting your house ready to sell. Your kids may love their brightly colored bedrooms and that red accent wall may totally be your style but you want buyers to be able to picture themselves in your home; you want them to feel like it is their home. One of the best way you can do that is to give them a blank slate to look at. If all your walls are an off white (or even white) they can start to think about what colors would work best in each room with THEIR furniture and style.

Take Down Family Pictures: Again, you want potential buyers feeling like this is their home not someone else’s home their walking through. Even though we all know your kids are dang cute, let the buyers imagine their own kids’ pictures there. Don’t want to leave all the nail holes from the picture frames? Replace your pictures with landscape photography or other artwork. We replaced some of our pictures with photos my dad had taken and found others we liked at IKEA (we spent less than $10 for all them).

Less Is More: When people are looking at their potential new home they want to make sure their is enough room for everything they have. It’s hard to picture all their own clothes and towels in closets if they are packed full of your clothes, towels and miscellaneous items. This was a tough one for me because our hall linen closet was my catch all where I would just put random stuff I wanted to clean up but didn’t have a home for. Go through your closets (and the rest of your home) and box up anything you don’t absolutely need. Try to have your bedroom closets less than 1/2 full; it gives the impression that the closets are bigger. Also, limit the amount of toys you have laying around, even if you have a play room. Box up anything you aren’t using and either store it in the garage, if you have room, or ask family if you can keep a few boxes at their home for a week or so. Once you have an offer you can bring everything back and now you’re already a step ahead with packing…win-win!

Clean, Clean, Clean: We’ve looked at many homes to buy and I can tell you right now if I walk into a house and if it looks and smells dirty I’m already turned off. Yes I know they can be cleaned but do I really want to spend time cleaning someone else’s mess? No, not really. Before listing your home (and before taking pictures too) deep clean your WHOLE house. Scrub the walls, dust the baseboards, clean the carpets (only if there are lots of noticeable stains, if not a good vacuuming is fine), mop the floors, clean off the front and back porch. You want to make your house sparkle! This is always a good first impression when you walk into a clean house. Run the vacuum, do a quick sweep and clean all your bathroom mirrors right before a showing too to really make a great impression.

Make Your Home Smell Good (But Not Overpowering): Not only is a clean looking house a good first impression but a clean smelling house is also one of the first things potential buyers will notice about your home. You want your home to smell warm and inviting but without feeling overpowering. A few of my favorite scents are fresh linen or fresh baked cookies. But you don’t want them to get nauseous from the smell, even if it does smell really good. I used the Wallflowers from Bath and Body Works but unplugged them before we left for people to come see the home so you could still smell clean but it was more toned down.

Selling your home doesn’t have to be stressful and you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars getting it ready to sell. Make it look bigger by getting rid of clutter, appealing to anyone walking through by keeping your walls neutral and taking down family pictures and really wow them with a clean looking and smelling home. You will easy attract the right buyer and your home will sell before you know it. 

Are you planning to sell your home this year?