Staging Your Kitchen for Resale

Arranging your home in a way that is accessible to potential buyers is a surefire way to sell your home more quickly and at a higher price. Staging is important, but staging the kitchen is crucial as it is a major selling point of a home. Your potential buyers should be able to visualize themselves in the kitchen as if it were their own home. Check out these easy tips on how to stage your kitchen for resale.

Before you even begin to stage, you need to go over the kitchen with a fine tooth comb for anything that needs to be fixed. Noisy refrigerators, scratched cabinets, or chipped floor tiles should be taken care of.  Give the walls a fresh coat of paint if they’re looking dull. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a brand new kitchen to sell the place. Make sure everything looks good and is working. Stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops are great, but if your kitchen is in perfect working condition it will sell just as well.

Your kitchen should absolutely sparkle. It should be so clean that potential buyers would feel A-Okay eating things from the floor. That would be fine too because you should have had the floors mopped and baseboards scrubbed before they came over. Polish everything until it shines. Wipe down cabinets, dust the ceiling fan and make sure that the counter is free of spills, drips and crumbs.

Once your kitchen is spotless, start clearing out the clutter. Take down the magnets from the fridge and tuck countertop appliances into the cabinets. Nothing should be on the counter. Make sure that nothing is in the sink or dishwater (clean or dirty) and hide all of the cleaning products from view. If you have a cupboard that hurls Tupperware at you when you open it, this is your opportunity to clean it up! Potential buyers are going to open up doors and drawers so everything needs to be neat.

Highlighting the best parts of your kitchen and minimizing problem areas is very important when staging. For example, a custom bookshelf that you’ve left empty is a great built-in feature to highlight. Do so by borrowing a few cookbooks from your friends and setting them up. Let buyers see the potential in the space. If they see how they could use it if they lived there, they’re more likely to remember it. Set the table in an eat-in kitchen to make it look like you eat there every morning, even if you don’t. Make your potential buyers believe that this is the most functional kitchen they’ll see.

The key to great staging is to make a space look livable without looking lived-in. Fresh flowers adds to the homey appeal as does a decorative rug. Pull back the curtains and let in some sunlight to highlight all of that exhausting cleaning you’ve done. Hang some generic art, something that would be easily accessible to everybody.

Once you’ve cleaned, de-cluttered, and artfully arranged your belongings your kitchen will be ready for potential buyers to fall in love with!

This article was written by Erie Construction. Follow Erie Construction on Twitter for more updates on home improvement.