CULTURE
My House, Your Dream
By Elizabeth Station
Sorry I haven’t written. But I’ve been trying to sell my house—an activity not unlike sitting around waiting for lightning to strike. We live in northwest Indiana, so when my spouse took a job in Chicago in the middle of the Dan Ryan re-construction project it became clear that the Hoosier homestead had to go.
But before we could move to the big city, someone else had to come in and replace us. This meant they had to fall in love with our house as much as we had, spurning the thousands of other homes also beckoning them to buy. These days, it’s a dog-eat-dog world for home sellers. Not only must you have the right price and location, your house needs that extra je ne sais quoi that makes it stand out from the crowd. Given the market, it’s no surprise there’s been a boom in “home staging.”
What is staging, you might ask (especially if you live under a rock that you haven’t had to sell)? According to one web site, it’s “presenting your home in its best and most appealing light to the majority of home buyers.” Says another, “Home staging is all about illusions. It makes your house look bigger, brighter, cleaner, warmer, more loving and, best of all—it makes buyers want to buy it.”
The Brits, in their jaundiced view, call the practice “house doctoring.” But the folks at staging101.com take their craft much more seriously. “Staging is about selling a lifestyle,” they intone, “where buyers imagine themselves raising their families or entertaining their friends … where they can relax on the patio or listen to their favorite music … where they imagine themselves preparing gourmet meals or taking luxurious baths” and (are you ready for this?) “where dreams come true.”
So not only would I have to clean the place and deal with those dings on the kitchen molding, I had to prepare to make someone else’s dreams come true. No pressure.
The web sites suggested I call the International Association of Home Staging Professionals to hire a consultant (alas, no time) or watch HGTV for clever staging tips (no cable). Instead, I boldly decided to stage my own home. I wasn’t without resources—I do have a master’s degree in Latin American history (very useful in today’s real estate market) and am fresh off nine months of looking at beautifully staged homes in the Chicago area in preparation to buy there.
I can do this, I told myself. All I have to do is follow the five rules of home staging—and bam, they’ll fall for it like a ton of bricks.
* CLEAN. Rule #1 was easy enough, since I had a lot of help. I got the carpets shampooed by professionals, had the cleaning lady come twice, and forced my children to make their beds for the first time in their young lives. My sister organized the mudroom to look like something out of Martha Stewart Living and my aunt planted mums in a window box and “pimped” the medicine cabinets. By the time they finished, the place was so tidy it looked like gay people lived here (the neat kind), and they’d hired more gay people to come over and clean up.
* FIX. I left that to a painter and handyman, who did a blitz of repairs in the basement, kitchen and bathrooms the week before we began showing. Not much was needed, though, because the house was solidly built in1927 and well maintained ever since.
* ELIMINATE CLUTTER. This is also called “The 50% Rule” of staging, which means that half your crap has to go somewhere else so that buyers can imagine putting their crap in its place. Even the stuff in your closet has to be halved—one stager advises to “remove enough clothing so that garments hang without touching each other.” In our case, de-cluttering was easy because our next-door neighbors offered to put half our stuff in their garage, albeit temporarily. We also gave away some furniture to a Rwandan refugee family that had moved into the neighborhood (so conveniently!) during staging week.
* STAY EXECUTIVE NEUTRAL. I’ll admit this one was new to me. It means making sure that your paint, carpet, drapes and other major décor elements are in neutral colors so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of would-be buyers. Bright orange is out; creams, whites and grays are in. This rule applies to color, but it could also be expanded to include politics, especially in a red state like Indiana. In fact, had I given the matter more thought I would have removed some decidedly un-neutral items like the poster of Chairman Mao in my teenager’s bedroom, and the copies of Dude, Where’s My Country? and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them on the bookshelf. Oh well.
* DE-PERSONALIZE. Put your family photos away. Don’t leave underwear on the floor. As the experts advise, “Remove objects that potential buyers won't be able to identify with … political and religious items may turn off whole groups of buyers, because they cannot ‘imagine’ your home as their home.”
After you’ve followed the five basic rules of staging, all that’s left is to add some special finishing touches. You might want to choose a signature scent for your home—sweaty gym clothes or fried onions would not be good, but the aroma of fresh-baked bread is a proven winner. One realtor writes that staging “is all about dressing the house for sale. It's about adding the small details: the lipstick, mascara and, for simplicity, a stunning, single strand of Tahitian pearls.”
I didn’t have any Tahitian pearls, but I did have a lovely ceramic bowl that my husband picked up in Tuscany. Stealing an idea from a home I’d seen in Evanston, I filled the bowl with fruit and placed it artfully on the battered (oops, I mean “distressed”) kitchen table. Little did I know that the strategic placement of ripe fruit can be crucial, according to staging101.com, as part of a general effort to use “curb appeal and sex appeal” to create “interest and desire” within the buyer.
Once the stage is set, the final step is to get the hell out of your house and let the realtors take over. Between showings, the seller’s only task is to keep everything as clean and tidy as possible.
We managed it, but during the weeks that the house was for sale I learned a valuable lesson. For most of my adult life, I’d fantasized about having the kind of home that you see in magazines—not in Town & Country or Architectural Digest but, say, Real Simple. I hungered not for fancy possessions but for clean, uncluttered surfaces. I wanted a linen closet where all the sheets and towels were neatly folded and stacked. A sparkling bathroom sink. A lovely Tuscan bowl on the kitchen table, filled with ripe fruit.
Yet when I’d finally staged the house of my dreams, I was miserable. Keeping the place clean was a never-ending ordeal. I obsessively scrubbed the kitchen counter to keep stains at bay. I didn’t want to sit on the couch because I might dent the throw pillows. I even hesitated to use the bathroom—in short, I was a prisoner in a hell that I’d created. I wanted my comfortable old Hoosier homestead back. But I also desperately wanted to sell it to some stranger.
Lucky for me, we didn’t have to wait long. Research shows that well-staged homes sell 32% faster (and fetch 3 to10% higher prices) than others on the market. In our case, that was true enough. After three weeks we had a contract, and no one had cracked under the pressure.
In the end, we were able to find out why our home sold. Turns out it wasn’t the smell, or the tastefully arranged living room furniture, or the bright magenta mums in the window box. The buyer confessed that he loved the solid construction and the basketball hoop in the back driveway. In his fantasy as its new owner, he was out shootin’ hoops with his son while his wife watched lovingly from the kitchen window.
Go figure.
