1. Home Staging Trick: Some home stagers may try to make small rooms look larger by renting small couches, tables and chairs. Furniture from the kids’ section may be placed to highlight size. Part of the furniture (for example side tables, coffee table), the television and large pictures may be removed from a small room to make it appear larger.
How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Ask your real estate agent to provide you plan drawing showing sizes of all the rooms. Bring a tape measure and measure the size of each room. Measure the size of your own furniture and check if it will fit in the room. If your vehicle looks like a humvee, measure the garage (length, width and most importantly the height) too to make sure that it will fit the humvee and an assortment of stuff and the brother in law.
2. Home Staging Trick: The showrooms in some new condo buildings use smaller furniture, large mirrors and other space-expanding techniques to make the condo units appear larger than they are.
How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Ask to look at a condo unit that has not been staged. Measure the size of the rooms and your own furniture and check if your own furniture will fit.
3. Home Staging Trick: Your real estate agents may insist on viewing the house when it’s empty. They may say that this gives you time to examine it at leisure. That may be true, if you spend time measuring and working on a detailed checklist. A dinner table designed to seat 4 persons may be used as a staging prop and you might want to fit in a dinner table that seats 6 persons? Appliances and kitchen items may be removed from the kitchen counter top to make the kitchen space appear larger. Measure the kitchen counter space available, visual observation is not good enough. Bright and attractive decorative prop items may be temporarily installed in the rooms to alter visual attention.
How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: View the home when the owners are present. Check to see if the kitchen feel spacious with several people in it. You can imagine what it would be like to live there yourself, with all your personal property. But you might find that the real estate agent might be less supportive of you meeting the home owners. And if you do find a real estate agent who will provide for this, do me a favor by passing me that real estate agent’s contact information!
4. Home Staging Trick: Some home stagers may empty out closets to make them look larger than they really are and give the illusion of plentiful storage space. Clothing items in the closet may be arranged to maximize space visibility. A smaller sized bed mattress may be used to make the bedroom appear larger. A small sized dresser may be placed or the dresser itself may be removed.
How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Measure the size of each storage closet. And I hope you will be measuring a walk in closets and not the silly one rod closets. Make sure that the bedrooms can accommodate your king size mattress and other necessary furniture.
5. Home Staging Trick: Some home stagers may try to create a relaxed, elegant mood. You might encounter jazz on the stereo, wine glasses on the dining table, a roaring fire, fresh or plastic flowers and homey fragrance.
How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Imagine the same house with kids yelling, the neighbors fighting, your teenager playing annoying music that no other family member can understand, speeding vehicles and yesterday’s unread newspaper spread out on the floor.
The devil is in the details-German proverb.
I am a Civil Engineer from Louisiana State University. The compound word, Americaneer, is a combination of the words, American and Engineer.