Should You Hire a Professional Stager?

You've made peace with the idea of selling the house. You're even a little excited about it, because you know it's the right thing to do. It's also the start of a new chapter in your life. Whether or not you are still living in the house you are selling, you will need to stage it to sell. Statistics and sales figures show that furnished houses sell more quickly and for closer to the asking price than do vacant houses. If you want to sell quickly and profitably, I suggest you stage.

While home staging is not difficult, it does require you to objectively decide whether you can stage your house or not. If you think your house already looks awesome, hire a stager. If you are too emotionally tied to the "stuff" in your house to be able to make decisions about editing, hire a stager. If your personality is splashed all over the walls, hire a stager. If you are a hoarder (or just a pack rat), hire a stager.

Staging the house will require you to edit furniture pieces and decor items to suggest a single purpose for each room. When we live in a house, most rooms are multi-purpose. In the kitchen in our home, we cook, pay bills, watch TV, do homework and art projects and leave notes for each other on the fridge. In the staged kitchen in the house you are trying to sell, you cook (neatly). If there's a breakfast bar or a table in a nook, you eat there, too. But that's it.

If you are the kind of person who loves a challenge--a person who can approach staging objectively and who has an eye for minimal but inviting design, then go for it. You might visit my Squidoo lens Top Seven Home Staging Mistakes for some ideas to get you started.