These days, real estate agents have a little more to contend with, what with the advent in hut design where there’s now different rooms used for different bodily functions; eating, sleeping, bathing, grunting, and that’s not including the room that the previous owners added on to store their yak butter which is a must-see if what you’re looking to buy is a yurt.   That’s why real estate agents came up with the concept of the “open house”.

For the uninitiated, let me explain how this works.  A person decides they want a new hut, um….house.  The real estate agent would like the house seen by as many people as it takes to pack a stadium that’s hosting the World Cup Soccer Finals to overflow capacity. The rationale being that the more people that see the house, the better chance there is for it to sell. Makes sense? Me too.

After being in the staging biz going on almost 12,000 years, I’ve compiled a list of do’s and don’ts for you to follow when your agent tells you they want to hold an open house. If you’ll be living in the house while it’s on the market, you will be visited by other agents bringing their potential buyers to have a look-see and this list applies then too.  Heads up…this list is not negotiable!!!!!  Okay, maybe it is…that is if you’ll be okay when, after your house has been on the market for 3 years,  the LONE offer you finally get wants to pay you in ground up yak horn powder (which is a sign of great wealth among the people that live….um….where yaks live) and is contingent upon selling their grandmother.  All seriousness aside… here’s the list.  Finally:

Do:

This tops the list: Your house needs to be clean, white glove clean. The kind of clean like when your mom comes to visit.  And it needs to stay like this ALL THE TIME.  Of course normal people will understand that your baby projectile vomits when someone rings your doorbell.  But they will not get past a floater in the toilet…which brings me to:

Do keep the toilet lid down. Nothing says “I wipe my nose on the wallpaper” quite like a raised toilet seat.

Do follow your real estate agent’s instructions regarding what you should do when an agent wants to bring prospective buyers over to see the house.  Image is everything, baby.

Do make all the beds in the house every day. I don’t care if you have to hire those birds from Cinderella to help you, because an unmade bed denotes overall sloppiness which is a HUGE turnoff to buyers. Kinda like glistening wallpaper.

Do keep your kitchen tidy and dirty dishes out of sight even if you have to hide them under the baby’s bed.

Do keep an empty laundry basket that you can use to scoop up anything that needs to be out of sight for the times when a  real estate agent calls you from their parked car down the street and wants to bring their buyers by in T minus 5 minutes and counting.

Do know that some people will look in your closets. Maybe now might be a good time to find a place to store those whips, chains, and handcuffs.  ( I have some room at my house…….)

Don’t:

Don’t cook foods that leave a lingering and…. um….distasteful smell in the air. Baking chocolate chip cookies will only go so far to mask a cooking odor that hangs in the air like…like…fill in the yuckiest smell you can image here.

Don’t leave things lying around that buyers can trip over like: hoses, wires, anacondas….. which brings me to:

Believe it or not, some people will not appreciate your Komodo dragon and won’t get your subtle humor when you tell them his name is “Flick”.  It’s really best to not to have any pets in the house.  There’s just no way to anticipate that somebody’s Aunt Janet was scarred for life by her run-in with a surly ant colony. Go figure.

DO NOT hang around during an open house. Prospective buyers get a little jangled when the owner follows them from room to room and that is a bad thing. And just in case you’re curious about the people who’ll be coming to see your house, stop it. Stop it right now. Your REALTOR will give you a rundown of who came by anyway.  So during the open house, go to a movie, try horse back riding for the first time,  go to one of those place where you can make your own pottery (Personally, the appeal of those places escapes me. Maybe they serve alcohol).  Please stay away during the open house and let your REALTOR do their magic.

Don’t forget that you can always hide stuff in your dryer and even in the trunk of your car. If there’s room and you have an inside release, you can hide in the trunk too.

Happy Open House !

Wanna be immortalized on this here “Talk to CJ” blog?  Got a burning staging question that most ointments can’t help?  Add your comment/question below! Or email your well thought out and grammatically-correct question to me and if it’s even somewhat relevant to staging, your question (and my response) could appear here. My cat, “Atomic Blast Fury” is staring at me as I write this while my other cat “Noodle Button” is stealing my good silver. Ha ha, I’m kidding. I don’t have any good silver.

This has been another message from Karen Negrete IRIS™, your friendly stager.

Karen and CJ have worked together for many years helping home owners prepare their home for sale.  If you would like to receive a no-obligation consultation on how to give your home that WOW factor before going on the market, contact CJ Brasiel .

When I’m called in to stage a house, the Realtor and I will chat about anything I should know before I go in so I won’t be shocked…like the homeowner usually answers the door naked. I’m telling you right here and now that unless it’s Robert Downey Jr. answering the door, the Eeeeeuuuwww Factor will be set to Code Orange.

So my Realtor lets me know that her seller’s house is decorated in a style that can only be described as “Late Green Acres-Early Hee Haw”. In other words….“country”.  Additionally, Mrs. Home Seller is really into pigs.  So I go to meet with them and Mr. Home Seller answers the door with clothes on and I walk in.  From my vantage point, I see pigs (note that’s pigs…plural); we’re talking pig pictures, 25 or so stuffed pigs in various parts of the house, pig wall hangers for oven mitts…that themselves look like pigs, pig wall stencils, blankets, fireplace screen, lamps shades, etc. Oh, just kill me now. The sellers seemed like very nice people that understood the need for their house to be staged and were prepared to follow my every instruction.

I wrote up my VERY specific list of things they needed to remove from the house and as always, I went over my list with them and explained the reasoning behind asking them to remove things like certain pieces of furniture, heavy drapery and…all things porcine because the pigs may be the only thing that buyers will remember about the house. Studies have shown that buyers can get distracted by looking at personal photos, extensive collections, a motorcycle in the living room, etc. and will forget about the actual features of the house which is why stagers are always whining about needing a house to be as visually neutral as possible. (Plus we don’t want Realtors to be referring to their house as the “pig house” to other Realtors. Call me persnickety (I won’t answer) but it sends the wrong message.)  The sellers understood everything I had asked them to do and I left them to do the right thing.

A week or so later, I got a call from the Realtor with the report that Mrs. Home Seller was in agreement with everything I told them to do….but…..she wanted to know if she  really had to get rid of her pigs?  She thought they made the house look “homey”.  If you’re very quiet, you’ll be able to hear a collective groaning from stagers from around the world.

Good people, read me now and hear me later. Here is just one example of why you MUST make your house visually neutral:   Young Mr. Silicon Valley Guy is ready to buy his first home. He’s pre-qualified, has a big down payment and wants a 30 day close of escrow …or less if he can get it.  He pulls up in his shiny black BMW in front of the “pig house”.   He’ll take one, maybe two steps inside and then will be a blur as he’s making it for his car. And you’ve just lost your perfect buyer.

If a seller insists on keeping their pig collection or a Smurf alter or wallpaper depicting risqué behavior, they’ve effectively sliced their pool of buyers down to what I call “a needle in a haystack buyer”.  So…..if you want to sell your house quickly, step away from the pigs and do what the nice stager asks you to do. And whatever you do, make sure you have clothes on when you answer the door. But I’ll bend the rules for you, Mr. Downey.

This has been another message from Karen Negrete IRIS™, your friendly stager.
Interior Redesign Industry Specialist™

Now image that you’re looking to buy a house and the same things happens when you step foot in that really cool looking house with the awesome curb appeal.  Now let’s take it one step further…. your home is for sale and the oxygen mask scenario is being played out in a prospective buyer’s brain.   Can you say “turned off”? I knew that you could….

Every house has a smell of some kind, some less than others .. unless you live in a hermetically sealed home which means I’m busy the night of your dinner party.  Just because you can’t smell it isn’t a guarantee that your home doesn’t smell like your grandmother’s attic.  Barb Schwarz, the originator of the concept of home staging says “ If you can smell it, you won’t sell it”.  Total corniness aside,  she’s absolutely correct.

As a stager, I’ve literally walked in a home (as opposed to hovering on a cloud of rarified air which is my usual mode of travel) and expected to see a wet dog smoking a cigar while standing at the stove and stirring what can only be described as a pot of stale cabbage being boiled in fetid water.  I’m pretty sure I faked my own death on that job.

Animal odors, litter box odors, somebody keeps missing the toilet odors, last night’s dinner or even worse, last week’s dinner odor, cigarette or cigar odors , etc. will turn off even the most hardy of buyers so…pay attention here because this is important…when your Realtor or home stager gives you this news, believe it and remedy it NOW.

And here’s what you do:  launder or dry clean drapery, bedding, etc., shampoo your carpets, sacrifice a lemon to the garbage disposal gods, give your shower/tub and any other area prone to mildew a thorough cleaning with a citrus scented cleaner.  If an overall funky smell has moved in and is fighting to stay, pour vinegar in a jars or bowls and leave them in the corners of each room overnight.

When all else fails, there is a magnificent product called “Pure Ayre” that’s a food grade (that means totally harmless) product that’s guaranteed to eliminate all household odors. It’s something having to do with enzymes. This stuff can be sprayed, poured, injected (into carpets), fogged, used as carpet shampoo, and the list goes on.  I have personally used it when one of my own carpets got wet from a leaky pipe and started to smell like cat urine. I cast a very suspicious eye at my two cats but when they went so far as to hire an attorney, I decided it’d be cheaper to blame the water. And the stuff worked.  You can buy it online at www.pureayre.com or in some local stores.  The website also has all sorts of tips for cleaning and all that really fun stuff.  So what are you waiting for? Go get some. Scoot.

This has been another message from Karen Negrete IRIS™, your friendly stager.
Interior Redesign Industry Specialist™

The overall theme that night were the “green” features that the manufacturers had to offer and to a much lesser extent, the hope that all the food got eaten. (I did my part with the Lemon Bars.) For example, there are now some carpets being made from corn-based polymers which is a renewably-sourced polymer. It’s being called an earth friendly carpet fiber because it reduces CO2 emissions over the production of equal amounts of nylon. Not only that but since it’s made from corn, it reduces our dependence on oil and is more degradable in the recycling process. Rest assured that these carpets look perfectly “normal”, are very soft, long lasting, fade resistant and you won’t be tempted to want to chew on them to see if they taste like corn.

Wanna to kick “green flooring” up a notch? Wool carpets and rugs are back in a big way!! If you want to talk renewable and totally biodegradable, there’s nothing more natural than sheep wool. New Zealand sheep wool is the preferred wool used by carpet manufacturers because their farming techniques preserve the land and the absence of any internationally banned pesticides. Plus isn’t it nice to know that nothing was yanked up or was chopped down but was…. just shaved.

This is news……heads up when shopping for Bamboo flooring. While bamboo almost comes jumping out of the ground faster than bunnies…well, you know….be sure to ask about the adhesive that’s used to glue the strips together. Some manufacturers use lesser quality or non-recyclable glue which defeats the “totally green flooring” allure. It’s encouraging to know that so many flooring manufacturers are putting some serious muscle into making their products environmentally friendly while not sacrificing quality and appearance.

To learn more about green flooring options and how to read the labels, check out the Carpet and Rug Institute. Just resist the urge to munch on the corn carpet.

Written by Karen Negrete, Owner Transform Your Home.