How To Get Organized Before Staging Your Home
I just added an entire section in the HSR Certification training on adding Organization services to your staging business. We had so much fun doing an advanced webinar on the subject or organizing, I thought I would share the hot tips that I learned. Jennifer Lake a Kansas City home stager and designer who has years in the organization business before joining HSR generously shared:
- The single best way to market your organization business
- The best way to price for volume business
- The first rooms/spaces you should focus on for the client for maximum transformation
- Key phrases to use while organizing with clients
- How to incorporate organizing into your staging business
When it comes to selling a home, organization is key since it’s the first step to decluttering and starting the packing process. In fact, many home sellers will have professional organizers come into their homes before the home stager.
Here are My 5 Tips to Getting Organized Before Staging
1. Have a Plan – Organizing is very “intentional” and purposeful…it doesn’t just happen on it’s own and in fact, will turn into a huge nightmare if it’s not addressed throughout the home on a yearly basis. Start with three bins labeled: 1. Keep 2. Goodwill and 3. Craigslist/Consignment. You will also need two trash bags, one for trash and another for recycling (for magazines, plastic toys, etc…).
2. Take the Time and Be Honest With Yourself – I always say that successful staging takes a lot of time and energy, and organizing is no different. Jennifer says that each room/space takes about 4 hours to tackle, so plan ahead and carve out the 4 hours of time to organize each space of your home. While organizing it’s time to be brutally honest with yourself and ask whether each item is essential. Particularly when moving, it takes three times longer to unpack and find a home for a non-essential item, so removing unused clutter from your life and home is a gift to yourself.
3. Label Everything – What’s the point of planning and taking the time to box up those winter sweaters if you don’t label the box and end up forgetting that it’s there? There is an easy way to create labels, so you always know where everything is and it can be purchased at Amazon:
Epson LabelWorks LW-300 Label Maker (C51CB69010)
4. Like With Like – The key to successful organizing is putting things that are like one another…together. Think like a Target store and how they group like items in the same department. Don’t have your light bulbs across the house from your dimmers and extension chords. When you’re packing things up, think in terms of rooms and spaces. A mudroom/laundry room is a great place to put all of your utility items. Think in terms of “stations” throughout the home.
5. High Rent vs Low Rent Space – I liked learning about this concept because I teach it in the staging realm in terms of what buyers want to see the most. In the organizing realm it means that you keep regularly used items in the easiest places to get to them (middle shelves). Items that are rarely used can go in low rent spaces like the top shelves are very bottom. If you have too much “stuff” in the low rent space, it may be time to say good bye to it.
The goal of getting organized before staging is to have a home with only essential and beautiful items within it.
It’s important that a home stager knows quite a bit about organizing, so I’m so happy to have this new section within our HSR Certification program and am grateful to the many members who generously share their knowledge daily in Stagers Connect!
XOXO – Happy Staging!
Audra Slinkey
Hope to hear from you!
1-888-563-9271
