Saturday, February 4, 2017

On Stage(ing)

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My BFF next door is getting ready to put her house on the market. Again - her sales saga started three years ago, when she first decided to move back west to be closer to growing grandkids and aging parents. Unfortunately, the market was not so hot in Maine at that point, and she wound up renting the place to a fabulous group of organic farmers, of whom I have written here before. Now they've moved on to their own 80 acre farm (yay!) my friend and her husband are back in Maine, getting the house ready to get listed.

The first time they went through this, after living in the space for seventeen years, it was a question of 'how much can we pack up and store in the barn and still have clothes for work and pots to cook in?' As anyone who has ever tried to sell a house knows, the Realtor wants it as empty as possible - something that's hard to do when you're still, you know, living there.

This time around, my friend is in a Realtor's dream - she and her husband moved back with just a few suitcases and their laptops. All the rest of their worldly goods are in storage out west (and yes, THAT was a job and a half.) Now, along with painting, waxing wooden floors and overseeing plumbing and carpentry work, my friend has a new challenge: staging the house.

Turns out, the Realtor doesn't want it TOO empty. Prospective buyers need to be able to see suggestions of how they, too could live a gracious, cozy, efficient (yes, all at the same time) life in their new home. So her husband is haunting area Goodwills and scouring Marden's Surplus and Salvage and accepting neighbors' donations.

I had BFF over and we shopped my house for tablecloths, art, centerpieces, and other decorative touches. Since she's not working with items she already has (because they fit her taste in decor) she's free to create a kind of home fantasy - a dining room table set for two with crystal and white linen (ignoring she had her husband are more earthenware-in-the-kitchen types,) a desk and prints in the study suggesting a traveler writing her memoirs, a cozy living room with squishy sofas (that the neighbors' kids used to jump on, but buyers aren't actually going to SIT on them, are they?) and chunky knit blankets. Lots of bare space to see the details of the architecture of the 1837 house. It's perfect. Not anything anyone could LIVE in for long, but perfect.

Reds, have you ever had to stage a home? Help a friend or relation selling her property? Have you ever seen some crazy staging while house hunting?

RHYS BOWEN: When we were transferred back from Texas in the 80s we realized our home might be hard to sell. It was on a golf course in an exclusive country club with lots of rich neighbors and plenty of homes for sale. And our furniture--think garage sale classic. I'd just received a nice check for a book so we went out and bought new living, dining, family room furniture. (What a good excuse). It made the house look great.

We put all our junk into storage and allowed the kids about 2 toys each, yelling at them each morning to put those toys away and no, they couldn't leave their stuffed animal on the bed.

And the irony of that: John loved that sofa so much that he refused to get rid of it. Our grandkids dubbed it "the soggy couch of 1979". Finally I dragged him to a furniture store and we have new sofa and love seat. I'm so happy!

HALLIE EPHRON: What a job, and Julia you are a saint to help.

We bought our house in 1975 and haven't moved. Can't imagine moving. Can't imagine staging! Well, I can, and it's a nightmare. Do they still suggest baking cookies before the open house?

Do you really HAVE to stage it? I'd be up for lowballling the price and skipping the aggravation. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We've been in our house for 21 years. I can't believe it. I well remember the horrors of trying to sell the previous house while we were still living in it (with budding teenager and dog and cats). Rick hated the having to "live for the realtor" so much that he swore we'd never move again. So far, we haven't, but I think the only way we could do it without murder being committed would be to rent some place to live and put all our stuff in storage while the house was on the market.

Now I am plagued by the need to refinish our heart pine floors. They are the original 1905 floors, and were done before we moved in. Now the heavy traffic areas are really worn, but I cannot face having to move everything out of the downstairs into a POD in order to have them refinished. Suggestions, anyone?

Oh, and my daughter is a realtor, so any questions you have about staging I'm sure she can answer.

JENN MCKINLAY: Reporting from the frat house -- I can barely maintain a meningitis free environment living with three knuckle draggers. Pro tip: Buckets of sanitizing wipes are your friends, especially if you put them in every room. All right, I'm exaggerating -- but not that much. We've been remodeling our house room by room with the intent to sell but with life coming so hard and fast, it's hard to keep up with what needs doing. Scratch one thing off the to do list and three more appear. I have a feeling we will buy first then sell when our house is empty and we can get it all done without having to live in a construction zone. We have recently begun shopping for a new house and I definitely agree that bare houses freak me out since I can't conceptualize the flow of things. Then again, a too lived in house makes me feel like I'm intruding. I think what you've done, Julia, is lovely. I bet it sells in a hot minute!

LUCY BURDETTE: My brother-in-law recently put his house on the market in an area where homes have not been selling well. The realtor arranged for a stager to come in, and she brought furniture, artwork, and knickknacks. It did look amazing when she was finished, and it sold pretty quickly. The only thing that annoyed him was when they removed the books on his nightstand that he was actually reading!

Debs, about the floors, my only advice is just do it. It helped a lot that we were out of town, but it's still a drag. But the pain is short-lived and the floors will be gorgeous when they are finished!

INGRID THOFT: Can someone explain the huge bowl of Granny Smith apples to me?  Or the lemons?  Every time I see a staged house or a renovation reveal on HGTV there's always a huge bowl of apples or lemons on the counter.  Yes, it looks lovely, but it bears absolutely no resemblance to my life.  The fruit in my fruit bowl can be quite lovely due to my proximity to the Pike Place Market, but there's always a few browning bananas in the mix!  I am a huge proponent of getting rid of stuff so I actually feel like our home wouldn't require too much work.  My sister is an architect/developer/designer and one of her tricks is to make a fake headboard by stretching an interesting fabric over a wood frame and stapling it in place.  You mount it over the bed, and voila! a fancy headboard.

 Deb's Granny SmithsDEBS:  Ingrid, that is too funny. We keep a bowl of granny smiths on our living room table, just because the color is so pretty with the turquoise bowl. (We also have pops of that color throughout the house.) It only costs $4 at my supermarket for a bag that will last a month.

We used to have faux apples in the bowl, but the dog ate them:-)

JULIA: And then...? Ingrid, we keep lemons in a wooden bowl in the kitchen, but that's because we use them for drinks.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Well, it's like dressing up for a job interview, right? You make yourself look tempting and desirable. Oh, and smart. :-)  So, same with homes. The key is I guess, to make it look less like your personal house and more like "it could be yours!"

I've seen beautiful ones, and I've seen disasters--a pal of mine had hers professionally done, and it looked more like --"who would want to live here?"  A lovely cozy home with artwork and family photos (apparently verboten) was made all weird and pseudo-modern. A decorative plastic dog in the fireplace, I am not kidding.

And Ingrid, a bowl full of (certainly beautiful) Granny Smiths is proof NO ONE lives there--in real life they'd be brown or gone.(Can you imagine the Mom saying to the kids--DON'T eat those! And the kids saying--they're FOOD!)

JULIA: Wish my friend good luck, everybody - her first showing is today! How about you, dear readers? Tell us your staging stories!


  1. Only a true and special friend would help someone get a house ready to sell, Julia . . . friends who do that sort of thing are absolute treasures.

    House-selling adventures . . . We bought our first house [near Los Angeles] when arriving babies made the house we’d been renting since our marriage [for only $150.00 a month] too small for our family. A dozen or so years later, the day school ended for the year, I got on a plane and headed for my new job in Alabama, leaving John and the girls to pack everything and sell the house.
    Done with hardly a blink of an eye; the house was on the market for less than two days . . . no one cared that they were still living there; the realtor didn’t blink an eye when she listed the house and “staging” was never even mentioned.

    So we bought a lovely new house in Alabama. We put it on the market ten years later and I naively expected a repeat. After all, it was a spacious, well-cared-for house in a great neighborhood, close to everything. How difficult could it be?
    Well, you’d have thought we were trying to sell a falling-down, dilapidated eyesore for a million dollars. We couldn’t sell it lived in, staged, empty. The smell of freshly-baked bread, cookies, cinnamon . . . apples, no apples, lemons, no lemons . . . our house, apparently, was lovely only in our own eyes.
    Finally, we lowered the price and took a significant loss on the place just to get it sold. That allowed us to move on to dealing with the builder who took six years to build the house where we now live.
    These days, we are not anticipating any repeated house-selling nightmares . . . we’re simply staying put.

  2. Why do they always want you to hide your books? We have bookscases between the kitchen and family room that every realtor or designer that comes near the place tells us to remove, or put doors on. They are horrified when I refuse to hide my books. Visitors, on the other hand, often remark hiw nice it is to have books handy. Is the world becoming illiterate?

  3. Oh, *staying put* - that sounds lovely to me, too, Joan.

  4. Yes maybe becoming illiterate! It is a good question about hiding books. In my relative's case, they would only let him keep CERTAIN books on the shelves. Weird!

    Julia, love the before and after pic with the dead plant--we've had that look tool

    Joan, what a discouraging second story. You better stay put!!

  5. We unloaded our Atlanta house in a slow market, when the only important aspect for buyers was the glamorous $50,000 finished basement. Ours was an unfinished playroom.

    We were told buyers didn't read, so no books allowed. I had "grandma" furniture, so we moved it out. We painted all walls the same insidious shade of realtor tan.

    Take all screens off the windows. Swap out blueish lightbulbs for warmer tones. No toiletries in evidence. I had a customer go through the bathroom vanity drawers and complain that the house was messy.

    I kept a laundry basket handy for a last minute sweep of the house. Dirty clothes shoved in the washer or dryer. Toilet lids down. Shades/blinds in up position. All white bedding a plus. Garage doors in down position at all times.

    Buyers usually make their initial sweep in five minutes. Leave keys in all the deadbolts. Don't cook food with lingering odors. No evidence of pets. In a snowy climate, leave a chair in the front hall with a boot tray next to it. Customers can be considerate...or they can stamp out a cigarette butt on your freshly refinished hardwoods.

    Good luck!

  6. Agree w/comments Less is more Professional stager if good worth the expense particularly when you have furniture in storage otherwise if you have a good eye for color and arrangements you'd do better- personality sells.Now if the market is hot then fresh paint refinished floors and sprucing up entrance landscaping to give that "ready to move in today" look would do the trick. Moved a bit of our own houses this way in the past.Don't over price better to sell quickly then have house sit on the market for months on end-all staging efforts will then be for naught. Good luck with your sale!

  7. When we bought our house in 1998, staging was not yet a "thing." The house was completely empty. The colors on the walls were - interesting (purplish pink and forest green anyone?). I think the owners had been out of the house for almost a year and were having trouble selling it. They'd just recently put down wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room (which we promptly tore up to expose the gorgeous hardwood floors underneath).

    We'd be so screwed if we tried to sell now. After the kids leave, maybe we could stage. But I thought stagers could bring all their own stuff (okay, we might be able to leave the leather love seat in the living room)?

  8. I always wonder what the agent is actually doing when the seller has to do all the prep work, in spades.

    I had an agent tell me, "Take down those ceiling fans. It makes it look like there's no air conditioning." Um, there IS no air conditioning. Those fans are heavenly in summer.

    After my mom moved into a retirement home, we had to sell her lovely house on a lake in the country, half hour commute from downtown. Three different agents over two years,
    "Don't change a thing." "Oh, the market's slow right now; houses in the country aren't selling...."

    "Change everything." We knocked outselves out and spent a ton of mom's money getting it looking modern, new furnace, new A/C
    "Oh, the market's slow right now. Houses in the country aren't selling...."
    "It's a bad time of year, take it off the market for the winter." blah blah blah

    I put it up on Kijiji (cost me $8) and we sold it ourselves. In winter.

  9. We've lived here for 32 years, plus. I'm ready to go, to build a home where we can age in place, and we've decided to do that in the next year or two. We have the property, right down the street, where Steve's dad and he have had their studio for almost 50 years. The house is old, built around 1940, and a tiny five-room cottage where men have spent every day, often with live critters roaming around.

    The last time we sold a home it was 1987, and we had renters living there while the house was on the market. And they were not invested in us selling it quickly. In fact, they were building a home (he was the builder), and since it was taking longer than they thought they deliberately dragged their feet. It was really annoying.

    Over the years I've tried to keep up with a list of projects and improvements, but in order to sell this house quickly we will have to get busy and get a couple major things done. Two of my daughters have sold homes in the last few years, so I'll be taking tips from their methods of staging; it wasn't nearly so difficult for them, since neither had lived in their home for more than four years. It's a whole 'nother ballgame when you raised kids in a place, plus had businesses, etc.

    By the way, is there a reason why the comments section pops out now? It's much less likely commenters will come back and rejoin the conversation, I think, since there is no easy way to refresh for new comments.

  10. And we will be tearing down that five-room, grubby building, by the way. The refrigerator alone will need to be removed by men in hazmat suits.

  11. I am always suspicious of houses without books - lots of books - it's not natural!

  12. I'm nosy. When I go to open houses, I'm interested in how people live in a space. (I don't open drawers, etc, though!). Staging, to me, is someone's idea of how the house is 'supposed' to be lived in. Often very attractive, but hardly realistic. I also like empty houses, because I have a good eye for the possibilities of how spaces can be used for my needs. And yes, I once went to an open house (the owner was a realtor) with a freshly baked apple pie on the counter.

    I've put together a slideshow of my yard and garden through the seasons, to use as a selling tool when I get ready to sell. The trees in bloom, the flowers, the garden paths neatly weeded--and shots of kids playing in the yard with exuberance and joy radiating from them--can't think of a better come-on than that for a family with kids!

  13. One thing--I hate those stagings of bookshelves--where they take out 99% of the books and leave a few artfully stacked here and there. Books are the heart of the home!!

  14. Cannot help but wonder if the books were missing after Open House?

    sometimes people steal books or things that are easy to hide during Open House tours,

    A friend and her husband had Open Houses by Appointment only because they knew people would steal things during Open House.

    And people could see photos and video of their house for sale.

    Staging can help the buyer see how things fit in rooms.

    When I bought my condo, there was staging and it was easy to see where furniture could be placed in each room.

    Great photos!

  15. Karen in Ohio . . .
    I agree with you about the new pop-up box for the comments page . . . I’m definitely not a fan.
    Interestingly enough, if I use my tablet rather than my laptop, the comments for Jungle Red Writers show up the way they used to . . . no pop-up box.

  16. Julia, you and your BFF did a great job!

    Personally I would rather see a house empty than staged. That's how we fell in love with ours. After being vacant for some time, it had been renovated by a contractor, so the paint was fresh and the floors gleaming. Light poured in through all the undressed old windows and it was glorious. (Little did I know how cold all those old windows would make the place...) We never had any trouble figuring out where to put furniture, even though our front door opens right into the middle of the living room.

    I am horrified that books are considered verboten. "Buyers don't read?" ????

    Agree about the very annoying pop up box. No idea where that came from, but we will investigate!!

  17. Good luck with the house sale! We sold our house after living in it for 30 years -- the realtor and I had a long relationship, in a down market year or so. She pushed and pushed. In the end, we renovated the basement and -- the action that drove me nuts -- had the built-in wood shelves in the living room painted white. A neighbor's son had built the shelves, including a lovely hand-turned molding.

    She brought in a few odds and ends for "staging" but not like people do now -- a friend recently rented furniture and accessories to sell a condo.

    Eventually, we did sell the house, at a good price. Its deficits were many -- no central air, boring old bathrooms, no "family room." But we raised our children there and loved it so much.