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Happy Canada Day

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:00:05 +0000

Happy Canada Day from StagingWorks.

Home staging is a highly effective marketing tool used to maximize the selling price of homes and condos. StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company. We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging. We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects. Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell, and get a free home staging estimate. Or, call us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

StagingWorks Stages Toronto Home – Home Sells for $100,000 over Asking Price

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:33:28 +0000

We recently staged a High Park area home, which sold for $100,000 over asking price in just a few days.

We re-arranged furniture, added a dining room table, artwork, area rugs and accessories and transformed this bachelor’s home into one that a buyer would instantly fall in love with. And they did.

Happy Father’s Day from StagingWorks

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:09:44 +0000

Happy Father’s Day and all the best from StagingWorks. For some great gift ideas, see a previous post on our Toronto Home Staging Blog.

StagingWorks stages Toronto home – Home Sells for $70,000 over asking price in 5 days

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:29:42 +0000

Looking to maximize the selling price of your Toronto or GTA home?

This family home was in need of some tender loving care. With a very tight timeline and a stressed, overwhelmed home owner, the team at StagingWorks came to the rescue. Some serious de-cluttering and cleaning were necessary in order to allow the property show to its full potential. We added some lovely furniture, some beautiful art and accessories. The once overwhelmed and anxious home owner was transformed along with her house. She was delighted with the outcome. The results - the home sold for $70, 000 over the asking price in 5 days.

What makes a project like this one so satisfying for us is that we made a difference and delivered a better financial outcome for our client. We set a target, pulled out all the stops and completed an exceptional job on time and on budget. In addition, we needed to be sensitive to the home owner, as she was exhausted from the weekes of packing and de-cluttering. She was at her “wits end”. We insisted she make herself a cup of tea and sit by her pool while we got to work. Everthing turned out beautifully and we couldn’t be happier that this home owner can now relax and enjoy the results (and profit) of a job well done. With some of the profit she made in selling this house she is now going to put in a beautiful kitchen at her new home.

StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company. We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging. We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve the GTA and surrounding areas.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects. Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell and get a free home staging estimate. Or, contact us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

The five stages of home staging grief

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:36:38 +0000

The family photos had to go and the walls needed painting. After three decades in the same home, feelings were bound to run deep. (Karen Alton - Globe and Mail)

Back in the sixties, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross codified the five stages of grief to help us cope with the loss of a loved one. Recently, I discovered that the emotional turmoil of home staging plays out in a weirdly similar fashion. Trust me, there is a thin line between grief and interior decorating for a quick sale.

In both cases the first stage is shock and denial: What? Pictures of my family are not captivating to prospective home buyers?

Then comes anger: Are you kidding? We just painted the living room and dining room and front hall last year! Followed closely by bargaining: Okay. Fine. But if we strip the wallpaper, can we please, please, keep the blue walls?

Depression comes next: My whole life in this house has been a sham, so full of colour and memorabilia. Finally, there is acceptance. Reality crystallizes, you roll up your sleeves and sweat equity kicks in.

Sentiment aside, as with most people, our house is our biggest asset, our biggest investment. My husband and I needed the money out of our three-bedroom bungalow to move on with our lives post-retirement.

But having lived for 30 years in the same home, we were new to the not-so-gentle art of primping your house for the real estate market. We quickly learned there is a simple formula to the task of beautifying the old manse.

First, your house must be dehumanized (family photos packed away), decluttered and cleaned vigorously. Then it must be polished to a hard, minimalist shine with the walls painted, wallpaper stripped and furniture removed to reveal hardwood floors. Only then should the For Sale sign go on the lawn.

This is what the magazines reported and it’s what the professionals told us. We might be perfectly content living in our crowded, shabby nest (in fact we were), but if we wanted top dollar, in a timely fashion, we had better get out the rubber gloves, because the spiders on the windowsill and the clutter in the closets must go.

Clearly, our home stager had a practical eye. She waltzed through our house and suggested we repaint every room (except the powder room), replace all the wallpaper and ship out half our worldly goods to parts unspecified.

“You want prospective buyers to imagine their own stuff in the rooms,” she said, and prescribed neutral tones with names like Manchester Tan and Trendy Biscotti for the walls.

The colours were meant to create a contemporary feel, she wrote in her five-page report, “while adding warmth and spaciousness.” We knew she meant more warmth and an illusion of space to make the house show well and sell successfully, but as we were still then fixated on stage one (shock and denial), stripped down and tarted up is what we read between the lines.

Our real estate broker, a lovely woman who is also an old friend, was sympathetic. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “I felt like we were prostituting our own home when we sold it. It was rough. All I can say is, it works.”

I gave her three days to sell my house. We both laughed. She promised fresh flowers for the table. Did I mention the rule of three? Fresh flowers, fresh fruit and fresh baking – these are the sensual treats designed to complete any seduction, er, transaction.

So, the mop and the paintbrush came out, and a series of difficult choices reared their ugly heads: What goes into storage and what goes straight to the dump? Soul-destroying hardly covers it.

Even at stage five (acceptance), after three decades in the same home, feelings are bound to run deep. Would you throw away a pair of slippers just when they got comfortable? We grew to love our house with its rooms painted Chopin Blue and Wooded Path Green.

Thirty years is a long time to inhabit any dwelling in this transient world, but still I never dreamed it would be so difficult to entrust our house to professionals who must focus on the imperfections, not the context. Instead of a cozy family home they saw the dated wallpaper and quirky art and towering trees in the yard that only yesterday, it seems, were saplings bending in the wind.

But this was no time to get maudlin. The kids had married and moved on, with homes of their own. The dog was long dead. We have grandchildren, for heaven’s sake. My husband and I built a retirement home in a village in the country, a place where we can live the next phase of our lives, 30 years if we are lucky, close to nature in relative tranquillity.

There will be fewer stoplights (one, in fact), less pollution and a host of opportunities to play and display our quirks and idiosyncrasies before another home stager gets our call.

I guess you could say we finally achieved closure in our five stages of grief. Our house sold in two days.