You know that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore other parts of a house when it comes to staging it to sell.

In a series of blog posts, I’ll outline the five most neglected parts of a property when it comes to staging, and how you can stage them properly for your clients.

I’m going to start with one of the biggest selling features of a home:

The Garage. Many homeowners think they can simply close the garage door when they put their house on the market and hope that potential buyers won’t notice the clutter or hope they will forgive the mess. But, because home staging is about helping a buyer make an emotional connection to a home, you can’t allow your clients to take lazy shortcuts and hope for the best.

A garage can be a huge selling feature of a property but most garages are kept in a constant state of disorder. Because your goal as a home stager is to have a buyer imagine their life in a home, you can’t ask them to see past clutter because many won’t be able to.

• The first step for staging a garage is to remove all clutter. Help the homeowners to purge and ask them to get rid of anything that doesn’t have to be there. Advise them to donate unwanted items to charity and put any seasonal items they won’t use while the house is listed should be put in storage.
• For items that do need to be kept, put a pegboard up to get tools off of surfaces and make sure there are no piles of clutter on the floor.
• The homeowners can keep their lawnmower, bicycles and paint cans in the garage but make sure they’re organized.
• If it’s been awhile since the garage saw a fresh coat of paint, now’s the time to freshen it up – that goes for walls and the floor. (For tips on how to choose paint colors for the garage, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide.)

On Wednesday I’ll talk about how to stage a basement to sell. If you don’t want to wait, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. It teaches you how to stage every space in a home and it contains tons of photographs from my own home staging projects and even floor plans to help give you some inspiration.

If you have any garage staging stories, please share them by leaving a comment below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

[tags] home staging, home stager, home staging tips, how to stage a garage, debra gould, home staging training, staging diva[/tags]