Coming up on Sunday, May 4th, a class called “The Art of Botanical Arranging” will be offered at the Trolley Square Pottery Barn. The hosts will present on how to artfully display flower arrangements and faux flowers.

A home-seller might want to attend this class for the simple reason that superior staging and decorating sells homes quicker. Sometimes you just don’t have much to work with when staging your home, so you need focal points that stand out and attract attention. Your home may be spotless, but it helps to go above and beyond clean – and a well-designed flower arrangement in the kitchen or the main entrance will add life to the home. Faux flowers might work best for home-staging so that you don’t have to keep replacing flowers as they die. Just be sure to buy nice looking faux flowers.

Again, the class will be at the Trolley Square Pottery Barn, located at 552 South 602 East. Call 801-322-4050 for exact times.

Tags: Pottery Barn, home staging, real estate, home decorating

It turns out that Pottery Barn acutally does offer lessons in staging, more or less. Not a true real estate staging class, but random classes about how to make your home better. I just spoke to a Pottery Barn employee on the phone about these classes, and she said they are offered about once a month.

This Sunday, they will offer a complimentary class on how to select and care for upholstered furniture. I’ve never been to one of their classes, so I can’t give my stamp of approval, but I’m willing to bet that it will be good. It will be held at the Trolley Square Pottery Barn, which is located at 552 South 602 East in Salt Lake City. I think she said that it starts at 10am, but I was kind of distracted when she said that, so I would call to be sure. Their number is 801-322-4050.

Tags: Pottery Barn,home staging,Salt Lake City Trolley Square,real estate

Everybody acquires stuff after living in a place for a few or many years, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It only becomes a potential problem when you put out that ‘For Sale’ sign, and people begin to tour your home. Your stuff is your stuff, and therein lies the problem.

Too many sellers think that their furniture is in just the right place. They think that their stuff is placed exaclty where it should be. And for them, that’s probably true. But it might not be true for anybody else. And the reality is, when you make the decision to sell, your opinion no longer matters.

This may be a good time to hire a home stager. They’ll come in and arrange your home so that almost everybody will find it visually appealing. It takes some courage to invite that stager in and give them free reign, but it should be done. They don’t share the attachments to your stuff that you do, and they’ll get rid of what needs to be gone. You might not like everything that they do, but remember that they do this for a living, and they’ve seen what works. Putting your home in the hands of a good stager could be the difference between the sale or the sit and languish on the market.

If you don’t know where to look for a home stager I know a few great ones:

Weber Davis and Utah counties - Janelle Hendrickson of The DeZining Divas

Salt Lake City – The Red Door

Salt Lake City – Staging Made Simple

*My service doesn’t stop here! In addition to maintaining The Salt Lake City Utah Real Estate Blog, I also help people buy and sell homes in Utah. When you need help with either of these, contact me!

Tags: home staging,home selling,Utah real estate,real estate

While most will choose to stay inside and look at homes online from the comfort and warmth of their home, some are out there in the snow touring homes like it was summer. Home sellers would be wise to remember this. *Just because it’s cold out, doesn’t mean you can let your home’s exterior go unkempt.* Curb appeal is still important, even in January.

So if you are a seller, why not use this to your advantage? Why not make your home have the best winter curb appeal of any house on the block? Here is an idea. Put small Christmas lights around your yard sign so that it will be seen at all hours of the day. Or how about putting up three times more directional signs than you normally would, all with lights? You have to admit that nothings attracts attention like a seller or an agent who goes totally overboard with their signs. It also helps to have a clean walkway so that nobody slips before they get to your front door. Perhaps some sort of wintery decoration at the entrance to your house would help too.

It also really helps to make the interior of the house as cozy and warm feeling as possible for when the people come inside. But that’s another topic.

I’m just throwing out random ideas here. The point is that there are people who will brave the cold to come look at YOUR home. Why not make yours the best looking home around? No green grass shouldn’t mean that you can’t still have curb appeal.

I’m not referring to the pieces of furniture in the catalog, because few people would spend that much money to stage their home, but rather the design. Everything is so neat and clean in the catalog. Even in rooms with lots of books or other little things, they organize them in such a way that it looks extremely orderly.

I’m thinking that it would be a good idea to take some pages of the catalog to a seller who might not understand the importance of staging. I might ask them if they were a buyer, would they be more inclined to buy a home that is staged like this one in the catalog. I don’t know if anybody out there had tried this, but I think it’s worth a shot.