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House Staging 101: The Girls' Bedrooms

There are 2 bedrooms left in the Money Pit which need to be staged.

Like I mentioned previously, because our target buyers are families with children, we consciously decided not to depersonalize the bedrooms into guest rooms, but instead left them as "children's rooms."  The paint colors were already gender neutral (soft green and warm yellow) so although they are clearly girls' rooms, they could easily be converted to a different gender with different accessories.

When we bought the house J's room was also a little girls' room. It however was a hot mess.   This is a PERFECT example of how NOT to stage a room. There is way to much clutter, the bed is undefined, and the windows are obstructed.  It doesn't seem like a very large room in this picture.

 Here is the picture we used in our listing:
 
Big difference dotcha' think?

A big differnce in the room is the addition of the window treatments.  Here is what the room looked like before I hung the curtains:

And after:
 Notice I hung the curtain rods about 6 inches ABOVE the windows and dropped them all the way to the floor.  I also made sure the curtains covered all the empty space between the windows, and extended beyond the windows by about 12 inches. This gives the impression that the windows are actually much larger.  Much better than the sad artwork in the original room.

Here are some additional photographs of the room:
 You can see that the crib and dresser flank the wall in front of the closet.  This replaced a GIANT dresser unit the previous owners had.   Again all the artwork is framed in the same color, and the colors are all primary so it is easy to see how this wall color (which I actually hate) could be used for either gender and although bold, could be used a neutral. 

The white furniture is much nicer with the white trim than the natural wood of the previous owners. The lighter color rug also is not as distracting as the boldly colored one, but warms up the room.  Many people dislike hardwood floors in bedrooms because they are cold and because this room had a large open area the throw rug was a must.  (This rug came from Ikea, it was less than $10)
 The glider in the corner had a footrest (seen in the first picture where the windows are curtainless)  We removed that inorder to open up the space and removed the extra toys.  We left a few small toys in the basket next to the chair (since our kids still do have to play in here) so cleanup would be easy and they wouldn't be intrusive.
 In the corner (where the closet and built in shelves are located) I needed a little more light.  A white lamp with a pink shade light up the corner.  I staged the shelves with wicker baskets (which hide diapers and wipes), a few books and a couple toys.

E's room was formerly the office.  The room is oddly L shaped and is the only room left with its original closet. 

The original owners showed it this way: 
Once again, the photo quality is poor, there is way to much clutter (why would you leave your kid's easel in the middle of the room?) and the room feels small.  Are those fake flowers on he shelf? Ugh Yuck.

This photo is from the other end of the room than the previous one.  Once again, we used all white furniture, a light colored throw rug, oversized curtains and in this case, pastel bedding.  The long thin photo shows that there is a decent amount of floor space at the end of the bed (even though the room is long and thin:)

This is another shot from the same direction, but because it is horizontal, the rooms seems smaller because you pressed right against the footboard of the bed plus you don't see the window:
 
Normally I would have removed Barbie's Dreamhouse from the room, but E was having trouble adjusting to the loss of all her toys.  The move is getting a little rough for her so I decided to leave it.  If I was giving someone else advice, I would tell them to lose the dollhouse and move the dresser centered between the wall and the bed.  But in this case I sacrificed a little staging for lifestyle.

Looking in the other direction we have small desk setup (originally that corner contained a huge storage unit from Ikea with bins full of toys.  Because of the floating shelf (and a cable hookup) this is actually a perfect space for a desk.  So we took the organizer to the basement and replaced it with a $40 desk from ikea. 
There are books, a couple of boxes (which store E's tea set a couple other precious playthings), a few framed photos and of course, a princess tiara on the floating shelf.
 
I also want to point out that desk chair.  You may recognize it from when I staged the office.  It used to be bright ORANGE!  I sanded and spray painted it Krylon's Ballet Slipper Pink and now it is matches the room perfectly.
The orange chair! Circa 1972.

I continued the princess staging theme on the other bookshelves in the room.  I pulled out all the books with pink spines, added all the princess/pink/cupcake jewelry boxes and once again, family photos in pink and white frames.  
 
Lastly, I staged the closet.  A lot of people don't do this but it really is a KEY thing in selling your home.  People want storage space and they want to imagine how easy it will be to organize once they have enough room (yeah, keep telling yourself that people! )
I sorted all the girls' books by size and removed all the paperbacks and then staged the bookshelf we keep in the closet.  I added baskets for misc items and folded all the linens neatly.  The closet never looked better.

So there you have it.  Kids' bedroom staging 101.  A lot of work. And not how a "real" kids' room would ever really look, but it sure makes it seem like paradise!

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