Staging a House and Erasing a Home

My daughter just put her house on the market. She and her family are living there but it is no longer their home. Looking at her listing after visiting her days before the house went on the market, the transformation was huge. And kind of sad.

All personal items, from family photos to children’s refrigerator art to swimming trophies were packed away. Somehow, these things would deter prospective buyers from being able to imagine themselves living here. All pictures of my beautiful grandkids and most of their toys had to be relegated to boxes neatly stacked in the garage.

Here’s something that really killed me. Most books had to be removed from…bookshelves. The stager sent by the realtor also vetoed most decorative items and banished the KitchenAid mixer and other appliances from the countertops. The countertops and shelves in the kitchen are now bare.

Bikes had to disappear from view and outdoor toys vanished. Not even a stray soccer ball made the cut. Somehow, the folks looking at this house with three pristine children’s bedrooms need to believe that the kids never play or make a mess, even outside.

I watch enough HGTV to know how this goes. Someone flips or renovates a house. A professional stager brings in all manner of fancy furnishings. Prospective buyers fall in love with how great the house appears to be, even though once it is empty of the staging, it will never look like that. It’s all an elaborate fantasy.

My husband and I bought one house in our lives, back in 1975, and we are still in it. When we came to see it, the owners were actually home. They stayed out of our way as we looked around, but then greeted us, shook our hands, and answered some of our questions. We even got to pet their dog.

I guess we were smart enough to understand that the dog and furnishings didn’t come with the house. Somehow, we could easily picture how it would look with our things in it instead of theirs. But here’s the thing. What we fell in love with was not the décor or the blank canvas on which we could project all of our fantasies. We fell in love with their home.

Homes have personalities. When company is coming, we clean up our messes to make a good first impression for our guests. But as the visit continues, the true personality of the home, warts and all, emerges. I love seeing all of the touches that folks lovingly add to create their own homes. I guess that’s just me, because the Property Brothers teach us otherwise. When they are done preparing a house to go on the market, it looks the same as every other house they sell. I guess that’s what people expect.

I’ll never understand why having three books and one decorative item per bookshelf or making every closet virtually empty is so appealing. Are buyers so easily fooled?

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