My Top 5 Staging Hacks

One of the beau­ti­ful things about gain­ing expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly years and years of it, is the inevitable fact that you will pick up hacks along the way that will hope­ful­ly save 3 valu­able things–time, ener­gy and mon­ey! An addi­tion­al perk of gain­ing such knowl­edge is the free­dom to share it with oth­ers. So I am going to do just that! 

Although dif­fi­cult to nar­row down my go-to stag­ing hacks, the 5 that I find myself using quite often are as follows: 

1 & 2. Using Black Spray Paint & Rust-Oleum on the Fireplace

As I have said sev­er­al times in the past, when stag­ing a home you want to give poten­tial buy­ers as few objec­tions as pos­si­ble. Mean­ing if the fire­place looks “used” and cov­ered with soot, this can cause a dis­trac­tion and take away from the beau­ty of the house. By sim­ply apply­ing a coat of high-heat black spray paint to the inte­ri­or of the fire­place, it will elim­i­nate the fire­place as a whole, from being a pos­si­ble eye­sore. You can also use Rust-Oleum on the gold trim that often lines old fire­places. By doing these two things, you will give a main focal piece in your home a much-need­ed refresh. 

3. Pillow Hacks

Being resource­ful can only help you as a stager. There­fore, when you are try­ing to fin­ish up a job and real­ize that you are short one pil­low, I have a few tips for you. If you have ample plas­tic bags at your dis­pos­al, they are a great trick to stuff stan­dard-sized shams, making they appear full and upright. If it is a king-sized pil­low you are look­ing for, two stan­dard pil­lows can eas­i­ly be stuffed into the king-sized sham. The pho­to below is an exam­ple of both hacks.

4. Sharpies on Nails

After pour­ing hours and hours into a stag­ing job, it is nor­mal to want every­thing to be per­fect, or as close to per­fect as pos­si­ble. In a recent stag­ing, redesign and dec­o­rat­ing class I held, we were doing the final touch­es and hang­ing up cur­tains in our last room before our big reveal to the client. Although the room and cur­tains looked per­fect, I could not help but notice that the screws we used to hang up the cur­tains were all that I could see. Some may argue that only I would note those screws but I am will­ing to bet that a picky home­own­er or an inter­est­ed poten­tial buy­er could most def­i­nite­ly be dis­tract­ed by the shiny sil­ver screws in our dark brown cur­tain rods. There­fore, we sim­ply took a sharpie and col­ored over the tacky col­or of the screw. Voilà! 

5. Hang-O-Matic

This tool is a new love of mine. Although I have hung hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of pic­tures with­out it, I now have made the Hang-O-Mat­ic a sta­ple item in my tool­box. This tool is espe­cial­ly help­ful for art that is over­sized, heavy or has dif­fi­cult hang­ing options on the back. Your indi­vid­ual tape mea­sures, lev­els and pen­cils are a thing of the past, now being replaced by this all-in-one gizmo.

Hope­ful­ly these hacks taught you some­thing you did­n’t know before. There are a mil­lion oth­er things I have learned along the way and I am con­fi­dent that as your career con­tin­ues, you will add to my grow­ing list.