How to stage a house for sale in the Washington, DC area

The Washington, DC  real estate market is an exciting roller coaster of ups and downs.  But regardless of whether you are trying to sell your house at the peak of one of the area’s notorious real estate bubbles, or during the long, slow periods that stretch between, you will be facing a scene of intense competition.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of homes in the DC area, many of them just like yours, so potential buyers will be coming in with a wide list of options to consider.  Selling a home in this area therefore involves going the extra mile to present your home as uniquely desirable, above and beyond any of the specs about it that can be put down on paper.

Presenting a home in order to sell it most effectively is a process known as “staging”.  When you stage a home, you cast your net as wide as possible, setting it up to appeal to the largest possible audience.  That means that you don’t set it up the way you like it – you set it up the way anyone might like it.  The classic formula for effective staging involves four critical steps:

• De – clutter
• De – purate
• De – personalize
• De – corate

At each step, your home transforms from an idiosyncratic expression of your unique lifestyle, to a blank, shining template upon which any potential buyer could project his dreams.

De-clutter.  Most of the loose objects in your house are aesthetically distracting.  They pull attention away from the space and the architecture, and direct it toward whatever activity you might use that object for.  For the prospective buyer who just happens to share your lifestyle and hobbies, the clutter might distract them in a positive way, but for the majority of the public it will simply make them feel crowded and less at home.  Since you want to appeal to the highest number of people, all clutter needs to be removed from the space, or stored out of sight, when a house is being staged.  And don’t forget your exterior!  Garden clutter is some of the most toxic clutter to your sale, because it negatively impacts your curb appeal.

De-purate is a fancy word for “clean”.  Once all of the clutter has been removed from the space, all of the remaining surfaces need to be visibly cleansed of the wear and tear that you have inflicted upon it during your years in the space.  “Clean” means “new” in most people’s eyes, and “new” means “likely to be in good shape and last a long time,” which is the ideal state for a purchase.  During this stage in the process, if you come across a part of your house that is in particularly bad shape – peeling paint, excessive staining, etc. – you might want to consider replacing it or getting some serious work done.  Money spent improving a home for sale is often made back in the sale itself.

De-personalize.  Now that the space is clean and open, it is time to make it look as generic as possible.  That means removing any of the personal touches that you so proudly displayed while living in the space; spoon collections, quirky art, and yes – family pictures.  Even if your signature on the space is tasteful, anything that marks the home as yours is going to make it more difficult for prospective buyers to see it as theirs.

De-corate.  Finally, you need to decorate the space, making it universally appealing.  The look you are trying to achieve is spacious, sturdy, and harmonious – not embodying any particular style.  Repainting is often an integral part of this step in the staging process, because color is a powerful tool in maximizing visual space and harmony.  Choose light colors with tasteful accents, and accessorize with intelligently placed mirrors, plants (potted plants work well for exteriors as well), and simple, minimal works of art.

Once you have completed these four steps, the stage in your house has now been set to sell, and you can open your doors to the public with confidence and pride.

Tips on Selecting the Right Paint for a Project from an Experienced Northern Virginia Painting Contractor

Paint seems at first glance like an extremely simple substance: just some colored liquid that you smear up onto a wall.  Yet the amount of thought and engineering that goes into a paint mixture is actually quite involved.  Depending on the intended purpose of the paint, it will be engineered with different components, and  different amounts of each component.

Paint is composed of four different components: binder, pigments, solvents, and additives.  The binder is the substance in the paint that forms a strong film and adheres to the surface.  The pigments are solid particles suspended in the binder.  The solvents are liquid components that evaporate out of the film as part of the drying/curing process.  The additives are extra chemicals stirred into the mixture to provide certain physical or aesthetic properties to the film.

One of the critical ways that engineers change the properties of paint is by tweaking what is called the PVC, or pigment-volume concentration.  The pigment-volume concentration is the percent of the total paint volume that is composed of pigment particles.  It stands to reason that the higher the PVC, the higher the ratio of pigment to binder in the total volume of the paint, so paints with higher PVC have more pigment and less binder, and paints with lower PVC have more binder and less pigment.

Binder tends to dry clear, strong, and shiny.  Pigments, on the other hand, are opaque, colored, “flat”, and do not have any adhesive properties.  Without binder, pigments would simply flake off the surface.  Low PVC paints, therefore, have more of the components of binder: they are stronger, shinier, and less opaque than high PVC paints.  High PVC paints have strong optical properties, providing rich color and not too much extra reflection.  However, they are prone to “chalking”, which is when loose pigments flake off the surface as a fine-grained dust.  Due to the optical properties, low versus high PVC paints are classified based on “gloss”.  The more binder in the mixture, the shinier (aka, “glossier”) the paint will be.  Therefore, low-PVC paints are known as “gloss” paints.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, high-PVC paints are known as “flat” paints.

“Glossy” paints can be distractingly shiny; most people prefer the aesthetic properties of “flat” paints over large surface areas.  However, because they do not have the strength or the adhesion of glossy paints with high binder content, flat paints are not suitable for areas where they will be subjected to any sort of moisture, grease, or mechanical abrasion.  Flat paints do not hold up under cleaning, and therefore they cannot be used in areas that are likely to be stained, or where they will weather a lot of human traffic.  Examples of places that glossy paints are used are: trim, doorways, stairways, bathrooms, and kitchens.  Examples of places that flat paints are used are: large surface areas (walls and ceilings) of living rooms, dining rooms, and adult bedrooms.

There are also middle-of-the-road options, which have a medium sheen, hold up to cleaning better than flat paints (though not as well as glossy paints), and are suitable for diverse applications.  These paints are known as “semigloss”, “eggshell” or “satin”, due to the way they reflect light.  They have a more balanced ratio of binder to pigments than the flat and glossy extremes.

So when considering whether to use high-gloss, satin, or flat paint for your project, all you have to do is consider whether you need the durability of gloss, the soft optics of flat, or something in the middle.