Home Staging TNT

Gone are the days of selling your home the old fashioned way, through hoping and praying that probable buyers like you house. Currently, if you wish to sell your house at a respectable price, then you may desire to read regarding home staging. Home staging is a good technique to amp up the style value of a home therefore rendering it less difficult for you to sell it to prospective buyers. Listed below are a few things which you may want to know concerning home staging.

Don’t add too much. This time, the old saying that less is more is very relevant in additional ways than one. If you do not stop yourself from over-designing your house, you’ll simply find yourself making it look like a cluttered mess.

Speaking of mess, you need to stack books neatly in a shelf. Books should be piled vertically so that it is more pleasing to the eyes. If you don’t desire to be free from of your old magazines or other book materials, then you definitely might want to think about making or buying affordable containers so that you can have a place to organize them in.

Do not stick to the old fashioned means of designing your home. Think outside the box. Dining room chairs can be utilized to create a lounge area at the patio. A coffee table doesn’t have to be in the living room constantly. You can put it in the master’s bedroom to include more class to it. One thing concerning home staging is which you need to consider thinking out of the box more frequently.

Another thing regarding home staging is that it is all about the light. Letting the rays of the sun come in by clean and properly developed windows can be very alluring to potential buyers since it makes that scene of flawlessness and tranquility. Proper lights are likewise a great way to visually boost those less complementary areas of your house. If you can’t manipulate those places into looking more flattering, then look at manipulating the lights.

Finally, one more thing really worth remembering about home staging is that several buyers have various taste. You must never quit if one buyer says no.

What exactly is home staging and why would we want to do it. House staging is about making a mood or an illusion. Its not always logic that promps a home buyer to buy sometimes they buy based on emotions. It is about getting into the emotions of the buyer we have got to create that mood to be able to sell your house fast to the end buyer. Home staging can mean the difference between a sold home & an expired listing. Those that take some time to stage their home on average get 7 to 10 percent more for their homes & sell them in about a third of the time. Accurately executed staging leads the buyer’s eyes to the attractive qualities of the home and away from any flaws which all homes have.
Here i will discuss several tips that will help you with your home staging agenda.

1.Depersonalize and de-clutter your house. The buyer wants to visualize themselves & their family occupying the home & not feel like they’re a guest in someone else’s house. Remove all magnets and other objects from your fridge. Remove family photographs from all walls & shelves.
2.Clean and remove any odors from your home. Clean the home like it has never been cleaned, walls, windows, & baseboards. Smoke and pet odors happens to be the worst. Air out the home daily and have carpets cleaned for that fresh home smell. A house buyer will associate cleanliness with a well taken care of home.
3.Hire a handyman to take care of all the little repair odds and ends. Caulking bathrooms, kitchens and windows. Fix loose and broken flooring, tile, door knobs,hinges, most of which could be a deterrent to a potential buyer.
4.Create the illusion of more space. Remove any knickknacks & extra pieces of furniture to enlarge the rooms. Let the sunshine in, washing windows and increase the wattage on light bulbs could make a small space seem much larger. Add some fresh white paint, this will open space and again get rid of any unwanted smells.
5.Add some freshness to the house. Add a crisp plate of fruit on the kitchen table. Bring in some fresh plants and flowers. Have most of the outside greenery trimmed, overgrown shrubs and grass cut and some general landscaping will add more instant interest to your house.

Selling your own home could be difficult so when attempting to sell you should present your property in the perfect light. You have to make the home more attractive than the numerous other homes in the present market. Bottom line staging the home will help you sell your own home fast, sell your house quickly, and get a whole lot closer to your required asking price. Remember, give your home a buyers eye view. Clean up & enlarge the space to give the illusion, more for the money. Remove the untidiness & add added light. Brighter rooms turn on buyers; nobody wants to be a cave occupier so consequently nobody really wants to buy a cave.

Bathrooms have an average recoup rate of 102 percent that is a great return on your investment. A minor bathroom update replacing the sink, bath, tile, floors, toilet, vanity and fixtures will cost around $9,750 and a recently renovated bathroom like that will generally bring in an average of $10,700 at resale. A fresh coat of paint and a tub re-glaze are inexpensive options that can really make an old bathroom look brand new. Bleaching and scrubbing grout and re-caulking around the tub can really take years off an outdated bathroom as well. These are just a few of the many home staging ideas that exist for your current home or for a property you are trying to sell. Whatever the case, the following are great tips to consider when remodeling a bathroom.

Step 1
Decide on a budget. You can remodel a bathroom for a fraction of the cost by doing it yourself or you can have it done by a professional contractor. Renovating inexpensively doesn’t always mean going with cheap materials necessarily. It is simply finding the ways and means to renovate using good materials and staying within your budget.
Write down how many tiles you need to buy.
What kind of sink or faucet you will use.
Are you going to have a full remodel or a partial remodel?
Will you be re-using existing cabinetry or existing shower doors or are you replacing them?

The answers to these questions will impact your budget. It is important to have a fixed budget and to stick with it!

Step 2
Draw out a plan of action. Before you start ripping off the dated tiles, you need to have a solid plan.
Are you doing a full remodel?
Are you going to change the footprint of the bathroom?

If you are, then that would mean you might have to re-work the plumbing and electricity. Include the new pricing in your budget.

Step 3
Do it Your-self or not. The largest amount of money people spend often goes to labor more than materials. If you do most of the work yourself, you would be surprised at how much money you would save with the project. If you are not a handy person, hire a reputable contractor.

Step 4
Hire reputable workers and contractors by being your own subcontractor. Eliminate the middle person, and hire the contractors directly yourself. You can go to home improvement stores in your area and request information of contractors they can refer to you. They would be more than willing to assist since you are buying materials from them. Also, ask for references through any of your friends or industry professionals.

Step 5
Buy materials directly through distributors and shop around for best prices. Make sure to measure correctly. Discontinued tiles are priced lower since they will no longer be available; just make sure to buy an extra box or two for future needs. There are Internet discount stores you can buy from as well. If you are planning on buying granite to replace your current counter, you can buy directly from manufacturers. Ask for scraps and see if your measurement fits, then pay a little bit of extra for finishing the edge and cutting a hole. A standard sized one sink vanity would cost anywhere between $100 – 250 if the scrap materials are available. Most manufacturers and dealers would be willing to negotiate on the price rather than just letting these unused pieces go to waste. If you cannot find bargain granite slabs, buy granite tiles instead to keep that look.

Step 6
Use existing cabinets, toilets, bathtubs and shower doors. You can refurbish or refinish them to make them look brand new again. Do not buy a new mirror if your existing one still works, you can frame it to make it look attractive.
Inexpensive (DIY) Options

Paint
Take a good look at the walls. A new coat of paint can change the look of any room and give it the new look you’re looking for. Painting your walls is easy and doesn’t take a whole lot of time. You’ll be surprised at what paint does to a room and this won’t break your budget.

Fixtures
Fixtures are another easy thing to change in your bathroom without spending your entire budget. You can buy some nice new fixtures for the sink and bathtub, and new light fixtures that are inexpensive from any home center like Lowe’s or Home Depot. You can hand pick them yourself and spend as much or as little as you want. The nice part about buying new fixtures from a home center is that if you have absolutely no experience taking old ones off and putting new ones back on, employee specialists can help and show you how to do it.

Flooring
If you are experienced with tile, you might want to consider laying tile on your bathroom floor. They are relatively inexpensive and if you do the work yourself you don’t have to pay for any labor. Tile is very popular and is a great way to change the look of an old floor. If tile is not an option however you can always lay linoleum. You can buy it in sheets or lay the linoleum squares. Both are inexpensive and easy to do. Changing the look of your floor can make a big difference.

Shower Area
Hit the shower. Nothing says “spa” like a great showerhead, and some styles, such as distinctive-looking rain-jet showerheads, provide visual interest as well as a great shower. Adjustable-height, hand-held showerheads can satisfy the tallest (or shortest) person, and also can be used as a sprayer for an easier method for cleaning the tub or shower.

Mirrors
Replace old single pane mirrors with picture frame mirrors. This is an inexpensive way to update and add charm to the bathroom. Mirrors cost between $20 – $80 each and are easy to mount.

So far in this series, we have talked about creating curiosity with Press Releases and announcements as well as giving your potential clients what they really, really, really want in order to build celebrity for your home staging business . Then we took it one step further by -celebritizing’ your business by offering limited availability.

Today, to conclude our series, we are going to talk about pricing your services for a celebrity home staging business.

As with the rest of this series, some of you will find this controversial. That is fine as you know the old saying -no press is bad press!’ If you are bold enough to follow these steps, you will find great reward in the abundance of newly found celebrity and recognition you have created for your home staging business.

In this economy there seems to be a prevailing thought process about low prices. The truth is, there is plenty of money out there, around every corner if you just give someone what they really want and show them the extreme value they will receive and how it will help them, specifically.

Why do you think that people who train on money, weight loss and sex are so popular? Everyone wants to be rich, skinny and sexy so the people who teach that have created huge desire and can now price their products and services accordingly.

When I first started APSD (www.APSDmembers.com) everyone said I would not succeed because my trainings were more expensive than other home staging training companies. But I never thought of myself as just another home staging training company and was prepared to present the difference and the value. It worked and I soon became an underground celebrity within the real estate investing community.

Recently my husband sent out a request for business quotes from contractors for his business. The funny thing is that he received 3 quotes and each one doubled in price. He immediately dismissed the lowest quote without even seeing examples because he assumed that the person must not be very good. Hmmmm. Have you ever thought about this? How can you run a -celebrity’ home staging business if people automatically assume you are no good because your prices are so low?

If you really want an abundant and prosperous -celebrity’ home staging business, you have to learn to price accordingly. For some of you this will be difficult because you have become the -Wal-Mart’ of home staging-pricing so low that you assume everyone will want to shop in your store. Nope, not everyone does and those that do are usually a pain in the rear end.

The best way to step up into a -celebrity’ home staging business pricing structure if you have started too low is to offer staging options. So, you can still keep your low end pricing for a lower end service, then offer a mid range service as well as a -super star’ hands off service that may include everything from an extraordinary home staging to curb appeal to real estate marketing.

What you will find is that most people choose your middle option. Eventually, you can let your low end option go, move your middle option to the lower end option, move the top to the middle and then create an all new -celebrity’ staging that may now also include packing and moving or whatever other options you want to include to best serve your home staging client.

Give your customer the choice. When you present yourself as the -celebrity home staging business’ and treat your clients as celebrities as well, you will be surprised as how quickly your recognition, business and celebrity grow!

To your greatest success, Karen Schaefer Founder, APSD The Association of Property Scene Designers The World Leader in Home Staging Training and Certification

For more information on Karen Schaefer and APSD and to receive a free home staging CD go to www.APSDmembers.com

Decorating your kitchen backsplash can be a fun and exciting weekend project. Kitchen backsplash tiles fit right into that special space between your upper kitchen cabinets and your kitchen counterop.

They are usually 18 inches high and 12 to 20 feet wide. Because your backsplash is a small area, it’s a relatively affordable place to use the pricier tiles, and also the place to get a little fancier with laying them. It takes a lot less time to tile your backsplash. This makes installing kitchen backsplash tiles the ideal weekend project for the do it yourself tiler. In one weekend you can transform your backsplash into a beautiful eye catching kitchen focal point.

There are many beautiful decorative tiles available to use as your kitchen backsplash tiles, and they are also fairly easy to install. There’s the ever popular glass wall tile which is impervious to stains and moisture. Some of these glass tiles are even strong enough for floors, but due to their expense they are usually used as an accent tile for walls. Glass tiles come in a wide variety of beautiful gleaming colors and textures.

Mosaic tiles are small tiles to 3 inches in size. They come in just about any shape you can imagine, such as fish, circles, stars, squares and the list goes on. These tiles may be glazed ceramic, marble, glass, natural stone or even metal, and these decorative patterns come already assembled on 12 inch square sheets with mesh backing, making for a quick and easy weekend tile installation.

Then there’s metal backsplash tile which can be made up of stainless steel, copper, brass or iron. These tiles offer a very up to date look, especially for kitchen backsplashes. They may be smooth, mosaics, cast in shapes or even stamped with patterns, and they are perfect to use as a backsplash tile, because they’re perfectly sized to fit the common 18 inch backsplash.

You can also use decorative accent tiles to dress up your kitchen backsplash. Simply choose a handful of dressy tiles that have painted or ingrained images you like, or are embossed with fish or palm trees or any other shape that suits your fancy. You can even use tiles that are glazed in bright colors and sprinkle them throughout your backsplash.

Continue your backsplash designs all the way to over your range, or create a different design for this area. Turn your backsplash tiles on the diagonal and frame the design with picture frame tiles and create a tile mural, or create a color collage using decorative color tiles that compliment the color scheme of your kitchen.

The designs you can create for your kitchen backsplash using decorative tiles are endless. All you need is a little imagination. The tiles will take care of the rest.