After all the staging we did on our own, we were excited about having a professional stager come over and check out our house. Our realtor uses a stager as part of her service, so we gladly took her up on the offer. The stager was here on Friday, and we spent Friday evening and all day Saturday implementing her suggestions. I’ll probably spend most of tomorrow finishing up the list she gave us, and hopefully by Tuesday morning this place will be ready for the photographer.
In case anyone was wondering, I thought I’d share some of the ideas that the stager gave us. It was nice to have a fresh perspective from someone who does this for a living and hasn’t grown accustomed to what our house looks like. I’m glad that she came over after we had spent the last four months sprucing up our house – can’t imagine how long her list would have been if she had stopped by in January!
The first thing she mentioned was that we needed some color. We tend to favor neutral colors, and we had gone even more neutral with getting the house ready for the market. But apparently we had things looking a little too beige. She recommended some red for the living room – a painting, throw pillows, and a decorative piece on the coffee table. She also said we should move our end table into the guest bedroom and have just the chair, couch, and coffee table in the living room. We had already cleared a ton of stuff out of that room, but she wanted it even more empty.
In the kitchen, she had me take down my homemade utensil holder (two strips of wood with nails in them – very fancy!) that I had put on the wall a few years ago, and put a picture in their place. Taking down the utensil racks damaged the wall a bit, so I had to use drywall mud to fill the damaged areas and then repaint. But it does look more open and classier without my utensils hanging on the wall.
Our guestroom had dark green trim, although the rest of the house had freshly painted white trim. Not surprisingly, she suggested we paint the trim to match the rest of the house. We did that yesterday, and the guest room does look a lot better with the white trim.
Our guest bed and our own bed just had regular pillows and pillowcases – no shams, no decorative pillows. She recommended that we get shams and dress the beds up a bit. Her recommendation was black and white in the guest room (we have a black and white print on the wall over the bed in that room) and reddish hues in our room.
She also suggested that we move some plants, clear out the closets (glad she didn’t see them three months ago, before I cleared them out the first time…), and paint our dining room chairs. Our chairs were very faded and chipped, so they were due for a paint job anyway. In addition, she suggested we paint a green mirror frame black, to update it a bit.
There were lots of other suggestions, but these are the ones I remember off the top of my head (she gave us a two page list). So far, we’ve painted the bedroom trim, painted the kitchen chairs and the mirror frame, cleared the closets so that they look like they belong in a Martha Stewart book, and thoroughly cleaned our crawl space. We also did some shopping.
She recommended that we buy a bunch of stuff. Pillows, artwork, centerpieces, pillow shams, etc. All smallish things, but the prices could really add up if we were to buy everything new. I had never shopped for throw pillows before, but we went to a few stores on Friday nights to check them out. The cheapest throw pillows we found were ten bucks each, at Target. Some that I saw were $50 each. For throw pillows. Obviously not happening. At those prices, it was going to cost us five hundred dollars to get through the list we got from the stager.
So we headed to our trusty thrift stores. For a total of $45, we ended up with six really great throw pillows (including one with a cover that was handmade in Thailand by a womens’ empowerment group, and still had its fancy tags on it), five bed pillow shams and pillows go go in them, three regular pillow cases, some beautiful crockery to go on display shelves in our kitchen, a vase, black wall sconces, and a few other small things. We borrowed some artwork and a couple of pieces of nice china from my parents, and a neighbor gave us some additional pillow shams.
Once again, our thrifting ways saved us a lot of money. It was fun to go to the thrift stores with such a specific list – sort of like a scavenger hunt. And amazingly enough, we found nearly everything we needed, at only two stores. Our house is looking much better already.
Our experience with the stager was great. She gave us really great ideas – the sort of thing that I wonder why I didn’t think of myself. It was really helpful to have a fresh perspective, and I liked that a lot of the ideas she gave us involved rearranging and/or painting stuff we already had, since that’s an inexpensive way to go. Now we just have to finish checking things off the list she gave us… I think I can, I think I can…
GC says
will you do this to your new home when you move in?
I often find that we put in a lot of energy for other people that we never get around to for ourselves. I’m the principal culprit. I never clean ’til company comes.
FrugalBabe says
GC – I’m a big fan of the idea of that cleaning when company is coming over is plenty. There are tons of things I would rather do than clean. If we didn’t have company on a somewhat regular basis, our house would get pretty messy :) I’m glad that this stuff is getting done (the dining room chairs had been bugging me for years, but I never got around to painting them until now), but there is no way in the world that I would put this much effort into the aesthetics of our house if we weren’t trying to sell it.
Kelly says
I am glad I am not the only one who might not clean if it weren’t for company coming over :)
Geoff K says
I think it’s been commented on before, but it sounds as if you have awesome thrift shops nearby. I wish we did here in Invercargill, New Zealand. Here it seems to be mainly old ornaments and nick-nacks whose seemingly sole purpose is to create clutter.
Are the thrift shops you go to huge? It seems as though you can get just about anything there. From crutches for your husband a while ago, to now throw pillows.
FrugalBabe says
Geoff – Yes, our thrift stores are huge. One near our house is the size of a grocery store (it’s actually in a building that used to be a grocery store), and sells just about anything you can imagine. The other one is a Habitat for Humanity Restore, with tons of furniture and home improvement supplies, as well as a good sized, two story area full of clothes, kitchen stuff, etc. But it’s not just our town – every large town around here has similar thrift stores.
Kelly says
I know this isn’t quite a comment about this post, but I almost forgot…Happy Birthday Frugal Baby! (only a week late…) Hope the upcoming year is as fantastic as the last one was!
FrugalBabe says
Aw, thanks Kelly! That was sweet of you. He had a good birthday – we had a little vegan hippie cake made of things like oats, dates, and apples, and I smashed up a banana for frosting. He loved it :)
Then we took him to the pool at our local rec center. He liked the family spa area (a hot tub that’s set to a cooler temp than normal – sort of like bathwater) but he wasn’t too impressed with the pool itself (probably felt a little cold, since his experience so far with water has been the bathtub). I’m sure that will come with time. All in all, it was a great day.
KC says
I wonder how you can turn your eyes into “stager eyes”? How can you walk in the door and see the things that they see?
Would be wonderful to see things from another perspective because, I think, we get used to seeing our houses looking a certain way and can’t see that there are things which, ummmmmmm, lower the tone.
Was a good post to get me thinking.