Home staging for out of town clients

The fall home staging / house fluffing market is really heating up. I'm fully booked for the next 4 weeks with client projects.

An interesting development, I've got three overseas clients. One in Hong Kong, Thailand and another in England. After years of having tenants living in their Toronto homes, they've decided to sell. This makes my job especially interesting since tenants don't always take the best care of a place. Repairs and painting are always the first steps, once they move out, followed by a specialized cleaning team.

I love doing empty houses, and when the owner is away I really have complete creative control. I'm starting with an empty shell just waiting for my vision of what the home can be.

I usually stick to a neutral color palette— but not always, as you can see in this bathroom. Here the 1920s tiles and fixtures are set off with a colorful shower curtain, bold towels and a rich gold on the walls. It creates a "look" instead of saying "this old bathroom has got to go!" As it happens, this bathroom was in a house I did that sold for $100,000 more than the client thought they would get! But I digress. Back to my three overseas clients...

Once I've created the color palette for the home and the whole place is repainted, I have the window coverings added. Then I move in rental furniture and accessories to create the dream home potential buyers can fall in love with. Every detail must be attended to and so much has to be planned. After all, once you've got the truck there full of furniture is not the time to realize you forgot a chair or a lamp you needed for the corner.

It can be intimidating furnishing an entire house from scratch when you've never done it before. It takes me about 3 hours to choose furniture and accessories for a 4 bedroom house. I take lots of measurements ahead of time and draw rough floor plans. I really pay attention to where walls jut out and exactly how many inches I have to work with in smaller areas. Imagine bringing in a dresser and realizing it doesn't fit where you thought it would. Or worse, they can't even get it up the stairs because you forgot to consider that!

I also bring my digital photos of the home for reference. Sometimes I'm choosing furniture for three houses at once and I need to keep them straight. Photos really help bring life to my floor plans and measurements. It reminds me of the mood of the particular house; I believe you really have to work with that. If you're staging houses of different architectural styles and ages, you can't finish them all the same. It won't work.

You know how when you go shopping for clothes, you try on a bunch of items and then convince yourself that they'll be more comfortable later. If the cut or color is wrong or for some indefinable reason the item just isn't "you" it sits in the closet for years until you have the heart to finally accept that it was a mistake and give it away. But sometimes you try on that special item that immediately feels like you've always worn it. It looks like yours even though it still has all the tags attached.

That's how I feel about home staging. Our job is to find the things that really fit the house, that feel like they belong there. It's what creates that indefinable feeling of rightness and homebuyers respond to it. They "try the house on" as it were, and feel like it's already theirs. That's when the emotional connection is made and thoughts turn to offers!

So whether I'm working with a local client or one that is overseas, my first priority is to really understand the house itself. To really get a feeling for it so that I can furnish it in a way that fits.

Working with a client that is out of town requires additional project management time so it's important to prepare your client for that cost of your time. You need to keep them in the loop as the project progresses as it requires a huge leap of faith on their part to turn their home over to someone else to decorate to sell in their absence.

I admire their courage and feel a profound obligation to do their home justice while they're away. It's not all about measurements, floor plans and scheduling (those these are critical) it's also about hanging out in the space and understanding and seeing its potential. At the risk of taking an analogy too far, how would the house look if dressed itself? What mood fits and feels natural?

Yes, I do stage homes for specific target markets but this is still part of the same equation. The house and all of its contents have to feel right for potential buyers to really respond the way you want them too. I avoid anything that looks overly contrived (like a tray with a tea pot on the edge of a bed), it just ruins the magic! Perhaps that will be the subject of another post... my top ten most hated staging tactics! Send me yours and I'll compile a master list!