[Home Staging 101] How to Elevate Your Laundry Room’s Appeal
[This is the first part in a series on staging a home for sale.] Here’s what we have covered:
- Staging Laundry Rooms
- Staging Living Room
- Staging Kitchen and Dining Area
- Staging Bathrooms
- Staging Bedrooms
My husband and I are preparing to sell the home we’ve lived in for most of our married life. And although we feel it is beautiful, we want to put our home’s best foot forward by staging it for sale. Like getting your hair done for a big event, staging your home is getting it ready for all the prospective buyers who will be walking through the door.
I’ve partnered with Kym Tarr from Shoestring Homestaging to bring you tips on maximizing your home’s appeal. Kym is a Professional Real Estate Stager, Certified Redesign and Staging Specialist as well as a Qualified Colour Consultant and Interior Decorator. And most importantly, she is a delightful person to work with!
Not planning to sell soon? Don’t worry, I’m also going to include tips along the way of simple improvements I wish I’d done before we decided to sell. Many home staging tips can be applied to your home today to make it feel like a bigger, brighter, and happier space.
How to Elevate Your Laundry Room’s Appeal
Today we will focus on the changes we’ve made in our laundry room, and in the coming weeks there will be information on the transformation in other areas of our home (as we complete them!)
BEFORE:
Here is what our laundry room looked like before Kym’s help. It was always a bright and beautiful space, but dark accents and too many items on display were making the room look small and busy.
Here are the things Kym suggested for this space:
- We didn’t want to repaint the space (Because it has been painted 5 times in 5 years!) so Kym suggested that we at least paint the shelf behind the washer/dryer and the top of the half wall the same white shade as our trim.
- She instructed me to remove some baskets and other items, to tuck necessities out of sight under the sink. She also recommended that I remove all items from the sink and countertop.
- She recommended that I exchange the gallery wall of family photos for one larger piece. We chose to use a mirror we already had.
AFTER
Our cleaner, fresher, brighter laundry room!
Other things we did:
- We replaced a damaged and ugly faucet. Damaged items send the message that your home is a fixer-upper…NOT what we are going for!
- We touched up the trim and ceiling paint.
I couldn’t be happier with the results. The space looks bigger, brighter, and cleaner.
Kym’s Takeaway points for staging YOUR Laundry room!
***Laundry is a chore we all have to do, but when staging a laundry room we don’t want to remind potential buyers of work or lack of storage. So keep this neat and organized for maximum appeal.
***If the laundry area is in a dark corner of an unfinished basement, we want to discourage that “dark and dingy “ impression. So brighten it up (simply by adding larger wattage bulbs), keep it clean, and perhaps even decorate it slightly, with freshly folded towels placed on the dryer. The important thing is that the laundry room is as pleasant a room as possible!
Even if you aren’t selling your house…
Here are a couple of things I wish I’d done sooner:
- Touching up trim and ceiling paint can have a huge effect on a room’s appearance. It isn’t easy to see in the photographs, but my husband and I were blown away by how much fresher the room looked simply with a new coat of paint on the baseboards and door casings!
- Put product labels out of sight. There is nothing pretty about a jug of detergent or a bottle of window cleaner. Keeping these things out of site hasn’t complicated my life at all but goes a long way toward diminishing visual clutter. And best of all, it’s FREE!
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how I managed to get my laundry room looking so nice and tidy with 5 kids in the house….here’s a photo of what my living room looked like while I was decluttering the laundry room…
Yup. The living room is next in line for staging, so check back soon!
Thank you so much for visiting The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking!