Creating an Irresistible Kitchen
Preparing your property for sale happens to be one of those tasks that can be dangerous. It’s so easy to overspend. It’s also easy to make poor decisions that will ultimately cost you far too much money. Particularly when it comes to kitchens and bathrooms, one must walk a thin line between over-staging and doing too little in the way of presentation. We often feel compelled to do larger, more expensive renovations when far less is needed. Lest you go overboard, the first thing you need to do is call in a home staging professional in order to determine how to present a compellingly beautiful kitchen without destroying the budget you’ve developed for the purpose of property styling for sale.
While you might be able to afford a full-on makeover of your kitchen, you probably won’t get all your money back when the final settlement on your home sale comes due. Money spent in the kitchen will predictably pay you back at the rate of 70 percent of your investment – that is IF you do it very well. If you’re planning to upgrade your kitchen, you need the help of a home stager more than ever.
We’ve compiled this list of tips and tricks from our expert home stagers. If you are determined to do your home staging without professional help, these tips may assist you, but they are no substitute for a good stylist.
Keep your goals in the cross hairs. You want to end up with a kitchen that looks and smells perfectly clean, creates a sense of welcome, has good-looking appliances and other features that are not out of date, and feels as if there’s plenty of room for everything a family needs by way of food preparation.
Hire a cleaning professional. If there is one room in your house that requires extra cleaning muscle, it is the kitchen. If you can, call in a professional cleaning company to work their magic here. Dirt, grease, and grime can lurk in places you may never have considered. In the end, you want to be sure there are no odours left behind, and the entire room feels immaculately clean.
Let natural light in. Especially in the kitchen, there is a real need for light. Take down the window coverings and consider leaving them down. If privacy is an issue for you, remember that this kitchen will belong to somebody else and more people prefer wide open and bright to dark and enclosed. Sparkling windows – the more the merrier – go a long way towards selling your kitchen space.
Evaluate your kitchen lighting fixtures. Old, outdated light fixtures in the kitchen can easily and inexpensively be replaced with more stylish ones. Talk to your home stager about whether or not your kitchen could benefit from some additional overhead lighting – and consider under-counter options as well.
This isn’t your kitchen. Home sellers get a little uncomfortable when they are told that the kitchen countertops need to be cleared. Most of us want a kitchen that is practical and easy to use – we want to be able to reach out and touch our small appliances so the blender, the toaster, the microwave, and the electric kettle are all on display in most family kitchens. When it comes to property styling for sale, practicality is not necessarily high on the list. In staging your kitchen pare the kitchen countertop clutter down to a toaster and a coffee maker – anything more than that begins to dampen the wide-open feel of your kitchen space.
Shine it up. The kitchen, more than just about any other room in the house, including the bathroom, is full of shiny surfaces. Keep those surfaces fingerprint free and dazzling by wiping them down at least daily after the kitchen cleaners have gone. Taps, sinks, appliance fronts, and stovetops will get touched and smudged. There is nothing that looks as nasty as a reflective surface that isn’t.
Our list of tips and tricks around staging your own kitchen will continue in our next blog entry, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, our best advice is to budget your own time as carefully as you do your money. When it comes to property styling for sale, using a property stylist with expertise in such things will help to save your time for considering the big offers you are bound to see soon.