Staging Your Home

4 Ways Self Storage Can Help You Sell Your House

Are you selling your home? The selling process can be tough, stressful and take more time than you like. Your house is most likely your largest asset, so you want to invest in the sale and do it properly.

This is why you need to stand out - and the best way to stand out is to showcase your house, not your stuff.

Staging has become a standard part of selling your home. It helps make sure that potential homebuyers see your house and not everything you’ve crammed inside it.

Many realtors offer complimentary staging to get your listing. Typically, staging has two parts:

  1. Empty a home of personal effects so that a potential buyer can “envision” themselves and their family living in the home.
  2. Bring in neutral colours and clever décor items like large mirrors (to make the space seem brighter and larger), glass tables (to make a living room appear bigger), and large inviting pillows (because, well, no one can resist the comfort of pillows).

Staging Your Home

If you decide to stage your own home, here are some pro tips on where to start, and how self-storage at Storage Solutions can help you get more for your home:

  • Declutter: It’s obvious, but painful, to properly stage your home, you need to get rid of most of your everyday “stuff”, especially personal effects like knick-knacks, family photos, etc. One category that adds a lot of bulk to your house is furniture. Most people have too much furniture and by removing just one item of furniture from each room in your house will make all of the spaces and your home overall seem bigger.
  • Float Your Furniture: Another great way to make a room feel bigger is to put your furniture into groups away from the wall. For example, two small sofas opposite each other with a coffee table in between will feel much bigger than a huge, L-shaped couch and a large table.
  • A Purpose to Each Room: We all actually have junk rooms, or areas in the house where things accumulate, like the basement. This unfortunately doesn’t show a potential buyer any value. Move those items into self-storage (with Storage Solutions in Milton!) and “repurpose” the space. For example, your basement, clear it, put down some rubber tiles (very inexpensive and will make the potential purchaser think your home is much warmer) and get a used bike from Play it Again Sports. Voila, you have a gym in your home (which you might benefit from as well).
  • Don’t Use Colour: Paint rooms bright, neutral tones, and if you want a room to feel bigger, paint it the same colour as the next room.
  • Odd Man Out: When you’re putting accessories in a room, always use an odd number and vary the height and width. If you want something dramatic, bring the outdoors indoors – clip flowers, holly branches, ferns – whatever is “in season” outside, and use that as an accent inside.
  • Finish All Your Fix-it Projects: Unfinished DIY jobs look cheap and make people think something is wrong with the house. Finish them all before you list. Buyers will do a mental deduction in their head and will take more off their offer than it costs you to fix the item.

 

Here are a few other things to consider when staging your home to sell:

  • The Outside Matters: When a buyer drives up to your house, they are already making a judgement – does it look well-kept? Does it look clean? Are there big projects to do? You’re wise to clean up your front and back yard.
  • Buyers Look at the Whole House: You probably aren’t in your basement and attic every day, which is why they become areas where you dump (or hide) things. But a buyer walks the whole house. Before you list, you must organize! It’s hard, we know, and we all have areas of “stuff”, that’s part of living a normal and active life. The buyer isn’t purchasing your “stuff”, they’re purchasing your house, which means all the rooms, and the garage or shed too.
  • Keep it Clean & Smelling Fresh: When you’re selling your house, it needs to shimmer, shine and smell clean. Neither your daughter’s hockey equipment, husband’s toolbox or son’s kayak belong in the house. And if you were thinking about making a particularly pungent (but delicious) dish, remember that what smells good to you for dinner, probably doesn’t smell great to a buyer at breakfast time the next day during an open house or private walkthrough.

 

So, what do you do with your personal things while your home is being staged to sell? You use self-storage! Often a small storage unit it the perfect size for staging. With our affordable rates and month-to-month contracts you maintain flexibility on when you move your belongings in and out of storage and keep costs low. View our sizing & pricing page for a full listing of available small self storage unit sizes and their prices, and to help you determine the right size unit to rent, check out our helpful comparable size graphics. 

Staging Your Home Tips Storage Solutions

We have some great tips in our blog to help you with moving and using self-storage for your move:

 

We also share helpful advice, tips and tricks on our social channels so make sure to check us out and like or follow us. You can also virtually tour either of our Milton self storage or Woodstock self storage facilities and different sized storage units on YouTube. We make renting self-storage easy and touch-free!

Have questions about how self storage can help you stage your home, move or sell your home? Contact us!

And good luck with staging your home & congrats in advance on moving into your new home!