Blog - New Interior Solutions

Mismatching chairs? Yes and… no

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

Home staging tip: I’m sure that by looking at these two photos you’ll see many differences, the paint color (once baby blue, now a neutral off white), the art on the walls, less clutter and different furniture. And that’s exactly what today’s blog post is about: the kind of furniture you need to use when you decide to put your house on the market.

As you can see the table in this (quite small) dining room was nice and unique. A little too big? Yes, but at least the glass top was making it look less bulky. The problem was really the mismatching chairs which, generally speaking, is not really a big issue since sometimes they work quite nicely together.

The problem, in fact, was that two of those chairs were just too…. can I say cheap? And I guess you know I’m talking about the greens ones, right? Those are usually the kind of chairs that you fold, put in a closet and take out when you have extra guests, but it’s not really a good idea to use them when you have to stage a house. This is the reason why we decided to change the whole dining set. The one that you see in the “after picture” was rented and we were lucky enough that its color was very close to the color of the cabinets. The cost? About $70 a month. Was it worth it? I would say, absolutely!

Home staging by Francesca Tosolini
Listing by Jonathan Jones
Photos by Francesca Tosolini
Furniture by Staging and Design Network

An outdated fireplace and its digital remodel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years, is their concern about how to present properties that for a reason (furniture) or the other (architecture) look outdated.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