Hamilton Real Estate Today!

written and contributed by Rachel Vanderveen of Centre Staging

I’ve been invited here to Donna’s prestigious blog to give an eight week series on making your home as beautiful as it can be in order to sell for top dollar! Over the next eight weeks, I plan to cover the main points of making your home fresh, marketable, and appealing to the widest section of your Hamilton market, which is really what staging is all about! As I tell the homeowners of the homes I stage: staging works. The statistics support it unanimously. By investing a healthy helping of your time, and maybe an appetizer-sized portion of your money, you can make your home sell faster and for more money than your unstaged competition.

This week’s blog is going to focus on the single most valuable thing you can do to begin your staging process: cleaning. Not just tidying, or de-cluttering (although, just hold on to your hats, because I’m going to push those too) but an all-encompassing, thorough and almost manic deep clean of your home. 

You have no idea what people are hiding behind the closed doors of their home! Their hedges may be trimmed, their siding may be power-washed, but I am here to tell you that most people out there do not live in clean homes. Now don’t go thinking that I’m some sort of pinched, OCD, neat-freak, because I’m not; I’m a barely-coping mother of 4, just like you. But I am also a home stager and a Calgary Real Estate agent, and I go deep into the bowels of homes and root around in the places where most mothers hide their deep secrets. I go under the stairs in the basement. I push aside sheets that have been hung with tacks; I open children’s closets, and I look under bathroom sinks. I call myself: the Stagenator!  No, I’m kidding; I don’t call myself that at all. That’s a silly name. I just call myself Rachel.

Idiomatic names aside, let’s get down to the dirty work here. Why is it that a clean home is so important? Well the bottom line is that when you’re selling a home, more often than not, you’re not just selling a place to live; you’re selling an experience. People want to walk into your home and say, “This is a beautiful home! When I live here, I’m going to live like this! I’m going to have eye-catching throw pillows, urns with long brown sticks in them, and above all, my floor is going to shine like this one.” It creates and atmosphere that is and appealing scene. It makes you want to jump in with your family and just start living there. However, in most cases, a home being as clean as it should be for selling is utterly impossible to achieve in reality. I, personally, still have a glob of spaghetti sauce on my dining room wall that my son launched three days ago. It’s not possible to live that clean. OK, fine, maybe it is possible for a select few of you who have perfect children, easy work responsibilities, and an endlessly understanding mate, but for the rest of us humans, we’re struggling. Baseboards get dusty, bathroom counters have toothpaste on them, and there are little handprints all over our refrigerator door.  

So much of what I will be telling you over the coming weeks is going to be about setting a scene that begs for actors to occupy it. It’s about decorating (or undecorating in many cases) a neutral stage where buyers can imagine their lives play out.

So first and foremost, before we do anything else, today I want you to clean. I want you to scrub baseboards, casings, windows, window sills, cabinets, shelves, pantries and faucets. So bring up the Miss Hannigan inside you, and make your homes “Shine like the top of the Chrysler building!”

Until Next Week…

Blessings

Rachel Vanderveen is Calgary Real Estate agent specializing in Calgary Condos, Home staging and Calgary Investment Real Estate.  But more importantly she is a mother to four adorable children, and an avid Real Estate Blogger. For more information on buying or selling a Home in Calgary, or searching Calgary MLS Listings, visit her website here.