Are you planning to sell your home? Are you getting it staged and didn’t have an alternate place to stay during the process?
Well, here’s the ultimate guide to showing your house while living in it!
Before going further, let me show you before and after scenes of Home Staging done by Decor2sell.
How to Stage your Home for Sale While Living in it?
While staging your home if you live alone is quite an easy affair, doing it with a family, including kids and pets, is a nightmare! With the constant cleaning, putting away stuff, and whatnot, one feels like giving up on the idea of having it staged for sale.
However, take a deep breath and relax!
It’s not all that difficult. Just follow our tips, and you can easily stage your house for sale while living in it.
So, here’s what you need to do!
1. Prepare Yourself Mentally
No matter how long it takes for your home to get sold, the first step is to mentally prepare yourself for moving out. This involves getting rid of all the extra items you might have hoarded up all these years.
Kids toys that nobody plays with anymore? Donate them! Clothes that you or the kids have outgrown? Give them to the needy! Those stacks of old newspapers and magazines from a decade ago? Get them recycled!
Once you start looking for items that nobody uses anymore, you’ll find plenty! And believe me, this excessive junk makes up more than a quarter of the things we have in our homes.
2. Get a Storage Space
We all know that staging a home involves moving your furniture or stowing away some of your belongings to make the place appear better.
But where will you put all that stuff if you’re still living in the same house? This calls for renting a storage unit.
For this, you will first have to decide which items need to be put away. Once you have finalized the list, get a storage space accordingly to keep all your stuff. Make sure it’s not too big for your stuff, as it will cost more. Also, if it’s too small, you’ll have to rent another unit, which won’t exactly help you save any money.
So, the storage unit should be enough to accommodate all your stuff without costing an arm or a leg.
3. Remove All Personal Items
When you’re mentally preparing yourself to move out of the house, de-personalizing it is also quite important. You have to start thinking that your home is not yours anymore! It’s something you’re selling. It’s a product!
And for that, you’ll have to move everything that adds a personal touch to your house, like family photos, decorative items that hold emotional value, or that lamp you bought after saving up for several months.
Once all the emotional attachment is out, your home will look more like a place you’re staying at for a while. This will make it easier for you, your kids, and other family members to move out eventually.
4. Clean and Keep It That Way!
This is the part where living in a staged home becomes a nightmare; keeping it clean!
If you’re cleaning up for just one person, it might not be that difficult. But if you have kids or pets, keeping it spotless becomes impossible. You have to be on your toes all the time, making sure the kids don’t spill something on rented furniture or the pet doesn’t do its business inside.
I know it’s difficult, but this, too, shall pass!
Either walk around with a mop all day to clean after the kids instantly or hire professional cleaners or someone who visits the house every other day to keep it spotless.
In any case, keeping the house clean and fresh is an integral part of home staging.
5. Get Organized
Getting organized is key! Whether you want to keep your house clean, whether you want to put away additional items, or whether you want everything to stay in place, you need to get organized.
Start by making a schedule for everything, like cleaning and cooking, and stick to it. Clean at specific hours, and the same goes for cooking. This will save you the trouble of slaving away in the kitchen all day and cleaning after the kids 24/7.
Next, when you’re cooking, use the oven, for the most part, to avoid the stovetop getting greasy. While you’re waiting for the meal to be cooked, wash and put away all the extra pots, pans, and containers neatly in the cabinets. Wipe the counter then and there so that the kitchen is spotless when you’re done cooking.
Similarly, clean the bathroom while you’re bathing to save time.
As for the kids’ room, keep a large wicker basket with a lid or a container to stash away their toys.
These small tips will help you keep your house clean and presentable at all times.
6. Hire Professional Property Stylists
I’m sure you already know this, but if you get help from property stylists and home staging professionals, your workload will be reduced by half. The time and energy you would have otherwise spent deciding what to do where can be used elsewhere, like keeping the house clean.
Home staging professionals will tour your place and style your home to bring out its best look based on your budget and house type!
All you have to do is to keep it that way!
If you’re based in Melbourne or Brisbane, you can reach out to us for partial staging, as we are pros at this!
We will rearrange your furniture, add new items, fix and repair anything that needs to be fixed and repaired, and even get your house cleaned up before the big day.
Find us on Google Maps for Melbourne.
All this while you’re still living in the house!
Summing Up
Showing your house while living in it can be a bit difficult, but there’s always a way out of everything! We have rounded up a few tips and tricks on how to stage your home for sale while living in it for your ease and convenience. And I’m sure that if you make up your mind and organize yourself a bit, you can easily get your house off the list in no time!