Selling Your Home. Is There a Difference Between Interior Design And Staging? Yes, Yes and Yes!
When you are selling your home, it immediately becomes a product that buyers compare with all the other homes they look at. Preparing to have your home look its best is a very smart idea. However it is easy to spend time and money on things that may not help all that much, and could even have a detrimental effect. A lot depends on the price range of the home. Hiring professional help to put your home’s best face forward is a relatively new phenomena.
Most Interior Designers think they can stage homes and most Staging Professionals think they can do Interior Design. There is some crossover, true, but the philosophies and purpose are very different. There is much more training, talent and skill needed to be an effective designer than most Staging Professionals possess. On the other hand, many designers don’t really understand the common sense or purpose behind Staging. Their egos take over and bad advice is given. Even though I believe I succeeded in my goals with the rooms below, they were Street of Dreams homes, so the final results were to that end.
When you are living in your home you usually want to express your individual tastes. You want it to look great, but you want it to be YOU! Enter the Interior Designer. After determining how you live, what your family’s functional needs are and style, color preferences, etc., she prepares and executes a plan that will make your home the envy of your friends who have no courage to dare to be different. You love it. The designer loves it.
The objectives are different when you are staging your home for sale. You don’t want the prospective buyer to fall in love with your decor, or be green with envy over your art collection, or focused on your great black and white photography collection of your children and pets. You want them to be able to focus on the HOUSE! You want them to get a vision of how their things and their famliy could fit in it. You don’t have to pack up and move completely out leaving it empty, but almost every home needs a little editing. We all accumulate a lot of stuff and a little early packing is in order.
Before I go further, Staging(R) is a Federally Registered Trademark of Stagedhomes.com. Those who complete this cirriculum and pass the exam have the right to the ASP designation, Accredited Staging Professional.
Staging is not rocket science! Much of it is common sense. If successfullly accomplished, prospective buyers will be able to view your home at its best. Best because its good features wil be discovered and enhanced and they can see and feel themselves living there. That usually means a faster sale and a better price. Much of this is related to Clean Up….Clear Out…..Fix In…..Fix Out! The hardest part is to be able to be objective. Pretend you are the buyer. Would you buy your house? If you are a person who can’t remember if you made the bed today, or your friends say to you ” I can’t believe what you did to your house,” (and not in a positive way) you definitly need professional help! (staging help, that is) NO 1. in a series of staging posts.
Posted by Kathleen Leavitt ASP, Interior Designer, a.k.a. Kathleen Cragun Part 1 of a series
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:28 am
Good post Kathleen. In the UK property development is very zeitgeist with several TV programs dedicated to the subject. I find it very frustrating to see people buying property with a view to making profit, giving it a make-over and then staging it with personal touches which are not generic enough to attract the wider market. As you say, the “interior designer” instinct within them is to do something extravagant and egotistical (to use your analogy) which ultimately costs more and risks putting buyers off! Objectivity is the name of the game!
Thanks for the post!
Derek.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Great minds must think alike- I wrote an article this morning about SMELL staging; I’d love to have your take on it!
May 24th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I love this post! Very helpful and insightful
May 24th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
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May 24th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
[…] Selling Your Home. Is There a Difference Between Interior Design And Staging? Yes, Yes and Yes! […]
May 25th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Great post - staging is sooo important, and there is no doubt that staging professionals require a different skill set than an everyday interior designer.
May 26th, 2007 at 8:28 am
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May 30th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Good Comment
July 15th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
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July 15th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
[…] In my first post on staging your home in preparation to putting it on the market, I mentioned Clean up¦Clear out¦Fix In¦Fix Out. Let’s start with Fix Out. Backwards, yes but the saying sounds better that way! Take a note pad with you and go outside. Better than that go across the street and look at your house. Pretend you don’t live there. Can you see the house? Does it look inviting? Is the yard mowed, trimmed, clear of stuff. Is the paint peeling or does the driveway, sidewalk or the roof have moss on it. Imagine the For Sale sign out front. If you (remember you dont live here) drove by and saw that sign would the house beckon you to take a look? We are talking Curb Appeal. […]
August 1st, 2007 at 7:52 am
[…] Most Interior Designers think they can stage homes and most Staging Professionals think they can do Interior Design. There is some crossover, true, but the philosophies and purpose are very different. There is much more training, talent and skill needed to be an effective designer than most Staging Professionsl possess. On the other hand, many designers don’t really understand the common sense or purpose behind Staging. Read more. . . […]
August 9th, 2007 at 7:41 am
[…] In my first post on staging your home in preparation to putting it on the market, I mentioned Clean up¦Clear out¦Fix In¦Fix Out. Let’s start with Fix Out. Backwards, yes but the saying sounds better that way! Take a note pad with you and go outside. Better than that go across the street and look at your house. Pretend you don’t live there. Can you see the house? Does it look inviting? Is the yard mowed, trimmed, clear of stuff. Is the paint peeling or does the driveway, sidewalk or the roof have moss on it. Imagine the For Sale sign out front. If you (remember you don’t live here) drove by and saw that sign would the house beckon you to take a look? We are talking Curb Appeal. […]