Nothing Personal - Staging your house to sell
Make no mistake about it, unless you are Terence Conran himself, your highly individual imprint can distract and potentially even repel a potential buyer. Take a deep breath, arm yourself with plenty of boxes, dump that domestic debris and de-personalise!
Even quite innocent additions from acres of family photographs to swathes of dubious bric-a-brac, place a psychological barrier between the buyer and your property, obscuring their view with the intimate detail of your tastes and pastimes. I am not talking about selling or binning your prized “dolls of the world” collection, just boxing it up and putting it in the attic in preparation for your move. A judicious paring down and re-arrangement of furniture and ornaments can transform the homely into the sellable in a matter of hours. Take a look at what’s left after the great purge and have some fun placing your classic survivors in strategic locations.
This is not the time for experimentation with dubious paint effects. If you do choose to re-decorate don’t start mucking about with stencils and rag rolling. When it comes to wall and floor colours, three adjectives should be written in letters of fire on your soul- light, warm and neutral. Buyers want value for money and that translates as spaciousness - even apparent space. Magnolia is much maligned as a stylistic cop-out but it remains one of the most useful shades together with a range of white and off-white shades when it comes to a cheap re-style. Flat magnolia with its bland, chalky surface is on sale on year round at just about every DIY outlet in generous 10 litre pails, and is an ideal choice to reflect available light and magnify space. Cream and off-white appeals to a wide audience and most people can contentedly “live with it” in a new house.
Clearly you don’t want to present your house as a sterile temple of bland vanilla, but reserve any bold colour for clever accessorizing.
Think about a harmony of colours, and stick to three accessory colours, no more. Rugs, cushions, curtains, and ornaments can present tasteful keynotes in any room. If your windows are cloaked in dark, heavy curtains consider investing in paler more diffuse material in voile, set in casual drifts behind tiebacks. A plain, pale rug can take some of the groove out of even the most psychedelic carpet pattern.
Your whole house should obviously be clean, but your bathroom and kitchen should provide an immaculate reception. Hide practical tools, from dish drainers to plastic bottles of anything out of sight and stage the kitchen as carefully as your living room and bedrooms. Consider changing the knobs and handles on fitted units, a really cheap fix, and if the linoleum is shot in a small kitchen, an off-cut to revive the floor could be a sound investment. Reserve some brand new sparkling tea towels to whip out just for viewings and carefully group one or two culinary ornaments to suggest a lifestyle of sophisticated entertaining rather than the chip-pan existence of the daily grind. Bring half-empty bins out the door with you as you leave and don’t just clean the cat tray and dog baskets, hide them and board out their furry occupants!
It is wiser to properly air your house rather than impregnating it with masking devices that will illicit suspicious twitches of the nostrils.
In the bathroom, clean the loo, sink and bath, in, out, up and over, as if the President herself might alight upon them at any time, and get rid of any limescale that will suggest hard water problems. Would you expect Her Excellency to see a mashed tube of depilatory cream in a gnarled curl on the windowsill? Bin those grooming knick-knacks gathering soap scum. Open brand new bars of soap, leave a plump roll of unused loo-roll and arrange some white fluffy towels (stored until needed) in a welcoming cascade on the towel rail or deck them by size on a chair.
If your teenager is enjoying a “phase” and his or her bedroom walls are black and bedecked in Marilyn Manson posters, commands, begging and bribery is completely appropriate. Sorry to be blunt, but all your children and even innocent chatty relatives are better off elsewhere during the showings. Very young kids can be relied upon to tell strangers in lurid detail about, for example, the time the plumber found a mummified rat preserved under your floorboards.
There is a direct co-relation in the head of a homebuyer, rightly or wrongly between a superficially clean, tidily kept house and a structurally well maintained house. It’s amazing the impact a cracked light switch, dripping tap, or dirty grouting can have on the unforgiving eye. What does a new light switch cost, €5-8? Any clown can change a plumbing washer! Scraping out and replacing sealant is another few Euro that might translate into several thousands Euro difference when it comes to an offer. It is almost impossible to cast a cold eye on your own home, so why not ask a couple of different friends or neighbours to view the house for you inside and out and insist they be utterly merciless in their impressions. Ouch!
