Blog - New Interior Solutions

An outdated fireplace and its digital remodel

Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

One thing that I’ve noticed after working with my realtor clients for so many years, is their concern about how to present properties that for a reason (furniture) or the other (architecture) look outdated. The easiest approach to this problem is, of course, to remove all the furniture and accessories and to replace them with some new, more modern ones. However, this is not always possible, either because the seller still lives in the house or because the budget doesn’t allow it.

For this property, in particular, I was asked to give suggestions about how to spice it up by using some of the seller’s furniture and accessories and some of the realtor’s. Eventually, we moved things around and came up with a nice plan. However, I couldn’t stop wondering how the room would have looked with a different fireplace, furniture, and flooring. Not to mention the TV: how many buyers would find it weird to place the TV in a lower cabinet?

For this room particularly, it was natural to imagine the TV hung above the fireplace which not only looked outdated but also had a mantel that was too high for a flat screen TV. This is why I decided to digitally render the room, and this is how it can potentially look with all these modifications.

Do you have a room that you’d like to remodel, but that you’d prefer to render before finalizing the project, in order to avoid costly mistakes? Let me know, I can help!

How to increase the perception of space when you stage a house

Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

Home staging tip: A few months ago I visited this beautiful mid-century modern home in Seattle to work with the client on a staging consultation. That’s right, in my opinion, staging consultations are never a one-way approach. I consider them a collaboration between the home stager and the home seller. You give recommendations to them, and they give you information that you will use to create a complete staging plan. One of my first questions is always: “Do you have a place to store some furniture in case we decide to remove part of it?”. Usually, the answer is either “Yes, we can use my storage unit” or “Yes, we can use my garage”, which, by the way, is totally fine.

For this house, my goal was to create more visual space since this was the most important room in the house. Not only because it was the very first room the buyers would have seen, but also because it was the most used room in the house (the kitchen was at the right of the table). The first thing I suggested was to use less furniture for the seating area, especially on the window side. I mean, with a yard like that and a window like that, you want to make sure visitors have no distractions or obstacles to bump into, right?

The second thing we did was to create more room around the table as well. And that is probably the easiest thing to do to create visual space in a small dining room: just remove the rug under the table along with the two chairs at the end of it, and you are done. This is even more dramatic if you have hardwood floors, like in this case. As you can see, the living/dining room not only looks much bigger but it also has a better traffic flow.

Home staging consultation by Francesca Tosolini
Listing by Jonathan Jones
Photos by Francesca Tosolini

How renderings can help buyers visualize a space

Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

We all know that sometimes it is hard to visualize an empty house and see yourself living in it, which is why home staging comes in handy. However, sometimes it happens that a house not only is vacant, but it is also unfinished. In this case, trying to visualize it as a finished space is even harder. A few weeks ago I staged a house in Seattle that presented this exact situation: a good portion of the property was unfinished. Once a garage and now a carpentry workshop, this space offered a huge potential in terms of adding square footage to the property. Since it was very likely that the buyers of this house wouldn’t have used this addition as a shop area, we decided to use digital technology to show them how this space could look like. The renders were added to the photos of the listing, along with two different floor plans: one showing an open space and one showing a unit with a bedroom. And it paid off! The house was sold to a family that was looking for a home with a mother-in-law suite.

Render by Francesca Tosolini
Listing by Jonathan Jones
Photos by Francesca Tosolini