The Secrets Behind Staging a Home
Have you been wondering if it is worth it to stage your home in prep to sell it? Well, your Birch & Co girls are here to tell you, do it. We market ourselves as an interior design and renovation company, but a lot of people don’t know that we also provide home staging services! Over the last two years we have partnered with several local relators who truly believe in the magic of staging. Honestly, it is magic- to transform several rooms within a few hours to make them beautiful and appealing to a buyer is our end goal. Huge shout out to The Megan Bell Group who continues to be our number one gal for staging! She is incredible, reliable, easy to work with and the hardest working in the biz. We cannot thank her enough for giving us the opportunity to make her listings beautiful.
Take a peek at a couple of our before & afters.
We are ready to share a few secrets on staging.
First up a question we get asked all the time, “do you girls own all this furniture?” Yes. Yes we do. We have purchased every single piece to carefully curate rooms that are modern, lived in and cozy- basically our manta for Birch & Co.
“What do you do with the furniture when it’s not being used in a stage?” It sits in our storage space. Our goal for 2024 is to take pics of all our pieces, keep a more organized running inventory list because honestly, we have SO many pieces, big and small, and sometimes we have to go back to listing photos to even remember what is where.
“Do you sell your staging pieces” YES! We are always open to selling our furniture. We have been asked by several realtors/buyers if our pieces are for sale, the answer is yes. We are also willing to sell pieces to our current interior design clients. The furniture we use is brand new, trendy and pretty- so we have sold several items to clients if it is something they are looking for.
“Staging seems so expensive, I don’t think I can afford it”. False. Staging is not out of the question. We are completely customizable when it comes to the packages we offer and honestly, no stage is ever the same. We have staged homes that have been recently renovated to be listed in the mid 300,000’s to larger homes in Dublin listing at over 1 million. We carefully select the right furniture for each space and always offer up which rooms we feel would be best staged. Typically, this is a living room, dining space, kitchen accessories, office and/or bedroom. We never sacrifice style and cohesiveness in any home, no matter the price point. Because we are marketed as more of an interior design and renovation partnership, we want our staging to also be a reflection of what Birch & Co is as a whole.
“Do you get the final say in how the home is staged?” With how the home is staged, yes. If we are working with a contracting team who has reached post renovation, we may not always love their finishing touches (ie: lighting, paint color, etc), but we work around it. We do love working directly with the realtors as they are a great messenger for us between the homeowners to relay our suggestions to them. Many times we are the middle man to help initiate getting painting done, etc because of the connections we have on our renovation side of our business.
“Do move all the furniture”. Yes, sometime we can recruit our husbands to help on a stage day, but honestly, Ashley and I are the muscles of the team. We have joked that our 6” height difference makes it really tough on carrying items, but we get it done.
And finally, some funny things you’d never know if you weren’t with us on stage days. Proper footwear is key, just ask Ash. She loves to sport a platform bootie or even a slide on for staging days, probably not the best choice, but she looks cute doing it and that is all that matters. We get hangry while staging and most times, I bring a cooler with snackies, but normally 1/3 of our way through the stage we are trying to determine what to Door Dash or searching for the closest Starbucks. The trailer is incredibly hard to drive and back up. I have days where I’ve been able to parallel park it in Grandview Heights and other days that I have it stuck on a no outlet at Buckeye Lake, which caused me to panic, almost cry and then Ash came to the rescue. Staging is not easy, its actually incredibly exhausting but also so fun, we love seeing the final pieces come together and even more getting a call from our realtors that the home is contingent!
We’d love to be a part of staging your home. Reach out to us directly on our website, drop us an inquiry or shoot us an email.
