How to Stage a Home for Sale: Tips, Tricks & Styling

Today, I'm going to meet with my friend, Melanie Bunting-Seymour, at a house that she is working on and about to put on the market. If it involves a house, Melanie does it.

She buys houses, renovates them, stages them, sells them, and does an amazing job of the interiors. But like everybody else, sometimes it takes a little bit of extra help to get on that exterior styling.

This property is ideal for what Melanie does as a renovator.

It was a perfect bungalow that was one of the last ones on the street that needed to be revived.

It seems like there's a house like this in every neighborhood. Somebody's moved out of it, and they haven't renovated it or kept it up.

Everything in the backyard is overgrown.

The fences are falling down.

It's a really big mess, and I think Melanie knows exactly what to do to make it all look new again.

While she knows everything about interiors, Melanie says she knows nothing when it comes to landscape design. So she called me in to help.

When you're staging a house that's for sale, you want to show how you're going to use all of the spaces. So we want to show them that there's going to be a lounging area with a fire pit, that there's a place to grill, and there's a place to eat your dinner out in this huge patio area.

Working with Melanie on this project is going to be so much fun.

Our first stop is up to Melanie’s attic where she has enough furniture and decor to stage three separate houses.

Every style that you can think of, traditional, modern, everything is in there. Having all of these things already saves a ton of money from having to go out and shop for this stuff.

Staging and styling should be something that incorporates what you already own, so you're not spending more money to try to sell your house.

In a short amount of time, they've ripped out that old rotten deck, put up a new fence, planted the backyard, and basically redone everything inside and out.

And so, now is the final step of the staging of the back porch.

Here we go.

You'll notice that the table is beige and the chairs are very dark, but they do have little bits of beige in them because you never want to be matchy-matchy. We just want to blend.

We want to show the potential buyers real-life uses, like the grill, a fire table, and a dining table, things that people will use in this space so that they can envision themselves there with their family.

I love these boxes. Melanie found them in an attic at another house that she renovated. They were shipping crates for typewriters, and they are going to make perfect side tables.

I'm not a very sentimental person, but seeing a typewriter box from the early 1900s that's just been sitting in an attic for years and years and having real history that we're able to use in our designs, is really neat.

The whole idea of staging is that it's not permanent. You're going to put it in there and as soon as the house sells, which is going to be super quick, hopefully, then you pull it right back out.

Because of that, there's no reason to do a lot of planting. So what I like to do is to have a larger container where you put store-bought plants in their smaller containers, and then just put some pine straw around the top. It's nice and fluffy, so it'll float over top of all of the containers, and it looks like it's planted.

As soon as the house sells, pull it back up and take it with you.

In this house, we're doing a black and white mosaic tile and brushed brass, so we brought the same colors outside. The brown around the accent pillows ties into that natural color on the table, in the wood,  and on the chairs.

It’s all tied together, which is perfect.

When we were sitting down for our consultation, I looked out Melanie’s window and saw palm fronds, and I realized that they were perfect for cutting down and using in this space. It's going to look really good in photos.

We also added a nice piece of art to that open wall to fill it up and make it not seem so blank.

And then we are finally going to add these cafe lights to create that evening time ambiance that everybody needs for their outdoor space.

Living space brought outside always adds value and helps you sell your home.