Shifting

So, for the past two weeks Frank and I have been working on our house almost daily. There are so many little details to take care of before we put it on the market next month. Much of the work has looked a lot like this,

Frank has been hard at work on the details, but, as he calls it in the decorative painting industry we have finally come to the "visual" part, where many of the details have been completed and now we can see our progress.
I feel so fortunate that our real estate agents are old friends of ours, a couple that I feel super comfortable with and love their sense of decor in their own home. In preparation for selling our home, they did a walk through with us and talked about how we should setup or "stage" our home to show it at its best. Little things like painting, plastering, decluttering, shifting furniture.
The process of staging the house for a sale is really about the psychology of the sale, which was fascinating to talk about with our realtor friends. As they walked through our home they helped us to see little details that we should change, things that we should move around to shift the energy and usefulness of the space, they also saw things that we had thought we should change but they actually liked (like the old painted wooden staircase going downstairs that bends a bit and we thought we'd carpet over, but they loved the original quirky detail).
The first room the we've really set up in it's staged state is our living room which, along with our kitchen, is the heart of our home. I snapped this picture the other day so you can see what things generally look like around here daily after some serious playing,

Now here is the after, the "staged" version,

One of their focuses with staging our house is that they want it to show that you can have kids and still live in a civilized way (heh heh), so most of the toys were moved downstairs to our new playroom, that I'll show you in the next post!

They had us move our couch and television cabinet over by the windows, to create a cozy section there, notice the fluffy white rug that I am now obsessed with. They also had us get a beautiful modern white desk that we placed between our bookshelves, to create a useful spot for doing homework or working on the computer. I love the new desk and I think that it will end up in my new studio after our move.

On the wall opposite the desk and book shelves they had us move our Ikea storage shelf, which is one of handiest things for toy storage. I just bought some simple neutral canvas bins to go with the straw ones that we already had,

Now, after the daily serious playing happens, its easy to just throw all the toys back in the bins and have a clean space again.

This is just the beginning, there's lots more staging to go. The really fun thing about staging the house for me so far has been that I like the way their ideas have freshened up our space, I feel like I am learning things that I'll be able to take with us and use when we go on to live in a new space.