A major aspect of home sales is presentation. Let me rephrase that, home sales is ALL about presentation. When your home goes on the market it must present the best face it has ever had. The simple truth is that it is a highly competitive market right now and sellers are looking to find any leverage that they can in order to get their home noticed by the buyers. As markets around the country have cooled off, sellers have had to go to greater and greater lengths to separate their homes from the masses of other listings, and so home staging has evolved. Home staging is now a business all to itself with companies popping up in almost every city. Home stagers offer a good service, but you as a seller can also do much of it yourself.



A major aspect of any home staging is the removal of clutter. This is easy to see in almost any home. For the sake of this article we will refer to it as clutter, but what you are really dealing with here is signs of life, occupation and daily use. Clutter can be classified as almost anything that is not essential to the visual impact of the home. This even applies to excess art and decorations and the trappings that you have chosen to make your home uniquely "you." In order to show properly, the home should be depersonalized. Unfortunately, all those things that make your home yours can get in the way of a buyer feeling comfortable and "at home" in your home. In an ideal situation buyers will come into the home and have no trouble seeing themselves living there. They should have the ability to visualize their furniture and decorations without the distraction of having to mentally cancel out portraits of the family and other overly personal items. The best course of action is to try to picture your home as a show home. you may have seen one or two of them in your time. The one thing that is the same about all show homes is the fact that they really don't look lived in. Now this is almost impossible to achieve in a home that is currently being lived in however it can be utilized as a bit of a guide as to what you can shoot for in staging the home.