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No Time for Renovations? Here's How to Stage Your Home

Having a home that looks just right can be the difference between it selling right away and sitting on the market for months. If you don't have time to make renovations, you can still create a great impression by staging it properly.

Here's what you need to do:

- Get rid of the clutter

And no, we're not just talking about that stack of bills and mail stacked on the counter. If you hire a professional stager, they are likely to remove up to half of the furniture from your home to make it look larger and more inviting.

So, if you're staging it yourself, why not do the same thing?

When in doubt, ask yourself this question -- "can I live without this item during the selling process?" If the answer is yes, sell the piece of furniture or put it in the storage.

- Don't be afraid to move things around

Just because a piece of furniture has always been in one room doesn't mean it won't look even better in another. Feel free to move artwork from its current wall to another one, rearrange furniture either within a room, or to another room completely.

Remember, when it comes to staging, it's not where you are most comfortable with items, but where they look the best in order to make your home sell more quickly.

- Increase the lighting

When a potential buyer walks into a room in your home, you want it beam and seem like it glows.

How do you create this effect? By replacing your light bulbs with higher wattage ones.

According to home design experts, a good rule of thumb is 100 watts per 50 square feet of your home.

- Make it look bigger with a painted optical illusion

The goal of every stager is to make the home look bigger than it actually is. One way to accomplish this is to paint the walls in adjacent rooms the same color. Because the potential buyer's eyes won't have to adjust to a new color as they walk from one room to the other, they will subconsciously think the rooms are larger than they actually are.

- When it comes to paint, go neutral

This doesn't mean all of your rooms have to be off-white. Feel free to consider neutral colors like beige, tan, honey, and even soft blues and greens.

The last thing you want is to offend someone with a bright color and give them a poor impression of the entire house!

- Remember the importance of flowers

Professional stagers will often bring in fresh flowers to decorate your home, so if you're staging it yourself, you should do the same thing. Make sure you are using seasonal flowers, and don't be afraid to use some from your own backyard.

But, don't go overboard.

Just try to create an arrangement that is both inviting and properly fills a space -- like on your kitchen counter or on top of the coffee table in your living room.

- Clean out your closets and storage space

According to the National Association of Realtors, two of the highest priorities on buyer's lists are closet and storage space. By removing your clothing from the bedroom closets, and those extra linens from the storage closets, it not only showcases those areas of your home, but also makes them look larger.

- When it comes to the kitchen, think movie sets!

Have you ever seen the production sets where they shoot the exterior shots of homes used in movies and television? It's often just a one-sided house that faces the camera, and the rest is just a frame.

If you can't afford entirely new cabinets, dishwasher, or stove, why not replace the fronts to appear as if they are brand new?

After all, when it comes to staging, the only thing that matters is what the buyer will see!

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