This Damn House

5 days till market, and counting.

On Friday, our friendly local staging consultant came by, courtesy of our realtor. she spent nearly 2 hours walking through our house with us, telling us "all shelves and storage should be 30% empty" and "put a throw rug here to help guide people into this room this way instead of that...maybe a dark red to pick up the bricks" and "you can make that table look smaller by putting a large bowl of fruit as a center piece".

The heart of her advice was: people don't buy houses rationally -- "this house suits our family's needs" -- rather, they buy the house because it suggests a lifestyle they would like to have. So stage the house to pander cater to people's fantasies. The living room, for instance, should cluster around the fireplace, not the TV, because even though in real life people will focus on the TV, they like to imagine themselves clustered around a fireplace. Hide the meds -- people aren't sick in their fantasies -- and show the sporting goods -- "when we move into this house, we'll be healthy, active people!"

Two bits of advice caught us particularly off-guard.

One, the big room in the back with the gorgeous windows -- which we use as a kids' bedroom/playroom -- we should stage as a recreation room/great room/family room. I objected on the grounds that 1) our kids need a place to sleep, even while we are selling the house, and 2) making the house a 2 bedroom drops its market value precipitously. The compromise was that while the room will still serve as a bedroom, both practically for us and for the purpose of listed as a 3BR home, we will decorate so as to suggest a great room. We tuck all the bedroomy looking items way in the back...and front and center we add some chairs and couches (clustered around, yes, the fireplace) and adult-oriented artwork (not "adult", just not primary colors of zoo animals :-). Two rooms in one!

Two...the room we carefully cleared out to make our brand new gorgeous dining room she doesn't actually buy as a dining room; it's really more like an eat-in-kitchen. So on her suggestion we moved the dining room back to where it's been for the last 10 years: in the living room. But we artfully arrange the furniture to suggest two rooms -- living room and dining room (again with the living furniture clustering around the fireplace). So now we have this odd but endearing layout:

Surprisingly...it actually works!