Home for Sale: 4 Practical Staging Tips {Part 2}

We are in the process of selling our first house and doing it DIY style too -- as in For Sale By Owner (FSBO). This post is part of a series called, Home for Sale, in which I'll share some of the details of our FSBO journey.

Last Tuesday I shared a bit about how we staged our home -- sometimes following "the rules" and sometimes not:

The Rules

Declutter
Remove Personal Items
Paint Neutral Colors on the Walls
Make Clear the Function of a Space (i.e. a Dining Room should have a dining table)

Today I'll talk about the last two rules. You can check out Part 1 to see what we did to Declutter and Remove Personal Items.

Disclaimer: We aren't real estate agents, or staging experts, just regular people trying to figure out how to sell our house and live in it during the process -- without breaking the bank! :)

Rule #3: Paint Walls a Neutral Color

We have painted every single wall in our home over the last 5 years and I just wasn't going to repaint them all. Luckily, much of our main living areas were painted in a non-offending basic beige. But even in the rooms that have bolder colors, I just tried to focus on things like simplifying the window treatments and accessories instead of painting all of the walls.

For example, we have blue walls in our bedroom. It's not a bold, dark color; but it does have a "baby blue"-ness to it and I didn't want it to come off as young.

I didn't take any photos before I made the tweaks in our bedroom, so these photos are about 4 years old. However, the window treatments and decor over the bed were the same until we staged our home.

I'd been over the crafted letter "G" and wrapped canvases for a while. They were some of my first simple DIY projects and I felt like they didn't look very expensive.

For our listing photos I replaced the "G" with a mirror from IKEA {yes, I used it in my Ralph Lauren Style Challenge, too} and I've since removed the canvases too.

The original curtains were sewn by my crafty mom, after I chose the fabric which coordinated with some of my pillows. As my style has changed, I feel like the coordinating fabrics I choose are too matchy-matchy -- but I still like the curtains. I may end up using them in another room when we move, but for now simple grey curtains from the clearance rack helped make the room feel more mature.

As a side-note: In Kentucky, window treatments typically "sell with the home" so I also wanted to remove them so I could take them with me.

Rule #4: Make Clear the Function of a Space

I totally support this staging tip. When I've been house shopping, one of the most difficult things to see past is not understanding the flow of a home or how we will use it.

I use my guest bedroom for craft projects in process, so I hid all the craft storage in a dresser. No Buyer would guess that it isn't always used as a bedroom.

We set up a bed in the bonus room in our basement so that even though it isn't a 4 Bedroom home {the room doesn't have a window so it doesn't count as a technical bedroom} a Buyer might consider it as a potential bedroom for a teenager or guest.

Also, we'd only been using that room for storage before, a catch-all room essentially. That's not a good function for a space and doesn't let the Buyer see how they could use the room.

That's how we staged our home. Outside of buying some thrifted containers to organize and clearance curtains; we didn't spend any money. Renting a storage unit to declutter or repainting all of the walls could have been pricey, not to mention time consuming. Selling a house is a big job already, so we tried to stage in a practical way -- making use of what we already had in our home.

Have you sold a home? Did you stage it? What staging "rules" did you follow?