When it comes
to arranging furniture in preparing your house to sell, there’s definitely more
than one way to do things. I often times borrow a piece from one room and move
it to another to further enhance a room. That extra armchair in the living room, may work great in anchoring
a sitting area in a bedroom. Home
staging is a recognized art of requiring careful calculation of the space’s
needs for showing. Homeowner’s tend to line
their walls with furniture, one piece after another. As a professional stager I
may recommend taking away as much as half of the owner’s furnishings to create
a larger looking space. Take a hard look at what you have and ask yourself what
you can live without? You really only need two pieces of furniture per wall, for
example: in a bedroom, a bed and a nightstand may work nicely on one wall,
while a dresser and a chair on another will do the trick of giving the room a
purpose and uncluttered.
Placing a couch five to eight inches away from the wall will also create
a little breathing room and make a space seem larger. If you can’t pull it away
from the wall because of space restrictions, float chairs or side tables a few
inches out to open up the room. If you have a large open room, put the couch in
the center facing a set of windows or a fireplace to break the room into two
separate spaces. And, if big enough, reposition chairs into cozy conversational groups. Place
pieces so that the traffic flow in the room is obvious. In most cases, this
means keeping the perimeters clear and gives the potential buyer the vision of
an open space.
