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Is Your Mantel Decorated for Fall?

Fake, fake, fake...

When your home is for sale, some seasonal touches help make the place look tended and freshened.

The autumn season, no matter where you live, seems to beg for natural props like leaves, vines, dried berries, and gourds.

A fireplace is almost always a room's focal point. And the mantel is a wonderful place to showcase that room and the season, whether it's the pale green foliage of spring, the bright (silk) flowers of summer, the earth-toned harvest items of fall, or some glitzy props of Christmastime.  

I assembled this mantel from autumnal kinds of things, some from the crafts store, some from my props closet, and some from the woodsy lot next door to my home.

Fall colors are part of my favorite palette. But autumn doesn't have to be all about oranges, blacks and browns. White pumpkins are all the rage now, and gourds come in all kinds of colors.

So, if your room, the one that houses your fireplace, is built around clear, cool colors like blueish pinks, pale lavender, icy greys, or blueish greens, you can still build a mantel around white and black, greens and browns, or variations on your color scheme.

Someone got paint overspray on these glass grapes. They look frosty, so I left them that way.

The mantel I pulled together started with the grapevine wreath I made in about 15 minutes from wild vines I pulled down. It's about the easiest wall decoration in the world to make, and a great base for any seasonal staging prop. Of course, the craft and decor stores are full of them, in all shapes and sizes, but I'm too cheap thrifty to spring for a $20 wreath base. 

I kept the wreath simple, hung it on the wall over the fireplace, and lined up my selected items on the narrow mantel. Then I adjusted them, until it all looked interesting and balanced.

I wrote about five different formulas to stage a mantel in my eBook, DIY Home Staging Tips to Sell Your Home Fast and For Top Dollar. When you're tweaking a mantel staging, look for a variety of shapes and sizes. Make sure some of your items share a purpose, a color, or some other quality.

Since this staged home looked too sterile, I liked the look of a wild and crazy wreath.

I chose a group of my own terracotta flower pots to ground the mantel ledge. Then I added some orange and green flowers, some leftover vines, and gourds that must have cost all of five bucks at Michaels.

My favorite pot was once glazed inside and out.

Even though some of the flowers are dollar store, fake orchids, I thought the color was perfect for the grouping. All the gourds are Styrofoam, because I can use them year after year. However, winter squashes, gourds, and pumpkins do paint up nicely.

The other things I chose were the adorable, orange silk Chinese lantern flowers, the funky cluster of glass grapes, the little green and orange gourds, and, on the wreath, a cluster of silk grape leaves.

I think the arrangement is festive without claiming too much attention in the room. It's perfect for a staged space -- simple and seasonal. If you haven't added some autumnal flourishes to your home, now's the time. Timely decor gives the impression that your home is new on the market. And home buyers are sure to notice that your home gets loving and attention year 'round.

How a Sofa Table Can Help You Stage a Room

Ever since I heard of something called a sofa table, I was intrigued. A sofa table is not the same animal as an end table or a coffee table. It's taller and longer.  

The handy thing to know about a sofa table is that it can do all kinds of things to make your home staging more effective.

The sofa table is designed to sit behind the sofa. It is often as long as a sofa or couch, but can be half that length. It needs to be longer than it is wide.

And it needs to be about as tall as the sofa it sits behind.

Since it can fill the space between the sofa and the wall, or between the sofa and the next room, plenty of furniture pieces can stand in for a sofa table -- consoles, demi lunes, low hutches, farm tables, or even glass topped tables constructed from pedestals.

Here are some of the ways a sofa table can help you when you are staging your home.

A table like this can add interesting style to an ordinary room. Betterimprovement.com

A snazzy mirrored table introduces us to the room we're about to enter. d30ppm.

This dark unit divides the room to make it more cozy. Decorpad.

This sleek and leggy table adds some formal sophistication. Cymaxstores.

When you just need to fill some space, a chunky sofa table does the trick. Cymaxstores.

A sofa table gives you the opportunity to emphasize a certain style, like modern. Cymax.

What I like about this table is its practicality. It's a workhorse for storage. Thomasville.

Here is another storage unit doing duty as a sofa table. Thomasville.

  

Although we can't see the sofa table here, it's there providing a place for the lamp. Electricrevisited.

When you have a focal point, like a view, that needs framing, a sofa table helps by giving you a base for adding matching lamps, like these pale teal ones. Cloudfront.net.

This wood table is the perfect height for the sofa. It brings balance to the space. Cloudfront.

A budget room can get a huge quality boost from a table like this one. Cymaxstores.

Is there a place in your staged home for a sofa table? Chances are, if you have a sofa, it could get some staging help from its own table.

Experiment with what you have. Perhaps you can convert a desk or entertainment center to a sofa table. Or you could assemble one from matched pedestals and a glass top. I once made one from plastic milk crates and a plywood top, all covered with the perfectly sized tablecloth. If a sofa backs up to a wall in a small space, it's easy to fake a table behind it by mounting a shelf on the wall at about the height of the sofa back.  

Once you put a sofa table in service for staging your home, you'll wonder how you got along without one!

Guest Post: A Professional Home Stager Speaks Her Mind

Staging calls for rethinking personal preferences.

Today we have a special treat because Carol-Anne of Use the Good Dishes blog has agreed to be my guest. It was the name of her blog that caught my eye the first time I saw it, with its subhead, "It's not really about the dishes."

When I read the story of how Carol-Anne inherited a set of dishes that her late mother-in-law had packed away and never used because she was waiting for a special day, I cried.

Even before she unwrapped those new old dishes, Carol-Anne's philosophy had always been, "Don't wait for life to be 'special.' Make today special."

Now that she stages homes for a living, Carol-Anne has plenty of opinions about what makes a home special. Be sure to visit her blog, where she writes frequent, funny, and enlightening posts about decor, life, books, style, DIY projects, cleaning, shopping, travel, and just about anything that catches her fancy.

Did I mention that she shares her thoughts on how she deals with her own obsessive compulsive disorder?

Warning: Once you start following her, you won't want to miss a post. Here she is ...

Thanks so much for asking me to be a Guest on your fabulous blog, Barbara! Yours was one of the first blogs I started reading, and since I work as a Home Stager, I find your advice often confirms my own experiences. Your e-book on teaching people how to stage their own homes is a terrific idea!

In preparing for this post, Barbara asked me what I would say is the biggest obstacle sellers face when they decide to sell.

I can’t speak to this question from the point of view of a Realtor, but as a Home Stager I can tell you that it seems to me that there is absolutely ONE BIG THING that stands in the way of successfully staging your own home:

Obviously we all have very intense feelings about our homes, and it’s understandable that people have a difficult time relinquishing a little bit of control....

But in my experience, it’s important to start thinking about your house as if it’s already no longer really yours. Potential buyers need to be able to picture themselves living in this space and if it’s looks too much like ‘your’ house, they often have trouble doing so.

The very things that make your house comfortable and inviting for your family and friends are often the things that need to be removed when selling.

When you invite people into your home, you want them to notice your personality shining through in your decor. Not so (when you’re selling.) Remove family photos, religious items, and other personal mementos.

This might go against what feels ‘right’ to you. But this is where the need to LET GO comes in.
Try to imagine that you’re beginning the process of removing yourself from your home. You need to de-personalize somewhat, so that potential buyers aren’t distracted by your personal items, but are taking in the space itself, and imagining themselves living there!

Will house hunters be charmed by this guy?

To ‘let go’ is to have an honest look around at your furnishings and decor and think about how strangers might see them. That orange and purple wallpaper might be fabulous, but be honest, is it really likely to appeal to the wide variety of tastes of the people who might be considering the purchase of your house? (I can assure you, it’s not.)

How about that ‘unique’ end table? If it’s something that everyone who visits you comments on, it might be time to put it into storage until after the house sells!

Now, I’ve obviously given you extreme decor examples, but you really do need to be ruthless!

Once you start to process the idea of ‘letting go’ of your house (which, let’s face it, is the whole point of selling!), you can make the changes necessary to successfully stage and sell your house!

It's a Mess Around Here

I'm not talking about my housekeeping. I'm talking about the mess left behind by Hurricane Irene. It looks like our yard was where anything in a mile radius that floats on water, ended up.

But this can't be true, because every neighbor's yard looks just as bad.

I wrote about hurricane damage, and the value of good real estate location on Wednesday. I plan to take the next week or two to get things back to normal. Thanks for your patience.