The Ultimate Collection of Home Staging Checklists

The Ultimate Collection of Home Staging Checklists

Are you getting your house or condo ready to sell? Home Staging has become a near-necessity for homeowners wanting to get the most from their sale. To help out, we’ve scoured the internet and put together a list of the best home staging checklists so you don’t miss a tip.

Home Staging Checklist #1

Our list of home staging checklists starts off with the folks at HGTV.

  1. Plan Ahead – basically get advice and do any minor repairs required before moving onto the detailed stuff.
  2. Clean, Declutter, and Depersonalize – This one’s standard advice from everyone and pretty self-explanatory
  3. Maximize Curb Appeal – This is about staging the outside of your house, not just the interior.
  4. Pay Attention to Kitchens and Bathrooms – These two rooms can sell a house and HGTV figures they warrant a point all of their own.
  5. Appeal to the Senses – The nose knows, and HGTV advises you to bake some cookies, keep the windows open, and relocate the pets.
  6. Show Off Your Home’s Best Features – Make sure your staging is emphasizing the best aspects of your home. Got a great hardwood floor? Ditch the carpets.
  7. Prepare for the Open House – Not really staging, but some advice for managing open houses. Standard stuff realtors know, but useful if you’re selling without a realtor.

Home Staging Checklist #2

Next on the ultimate collection of home staging checklists comes from HouseLogic. HouseLogic is a news site operated by the National Association of Realtors in the US. They provide a total of 81 ideas in their home staging checklist, broken out by 10 separate rooms or areas. A little overwhelming, but here are some highlights:

  1. Living Room – Go for symmetry with accent pillows and lamps, remove a few pieces of furniture, set the scene by displaying a board game on the coffee table.
  2. Kitchen – Get everything off the countertops, remove some of your dishes, freshen the cabinets with new paint, and organize the pantry.
  3. Bedrooms – Go neutral with the colours on the wall and on the bed, remove TVs and gaming consoles to create a more serene environment.
  4. Dining Room – Maybe put some place settings on the table and strike a balance between formal and casual.
  5. Bathroom – Scrub EVERYTHING extra clean, hide all your products, and fix any leaks, drips, or loose fixtures.
  6. Walls, Windows, and More – Here they advise us to use neutral paint on the walls, lighten dark spaces with a mirror, and wash your windows inside and out.
  7. Throughout the House – In the catchall category, they emphasize decluttering, depersonalizing, and cleaning.
  8. Exterior – For the outside, they recommend getting some attractive address numbers, power washing the exterior, getting a new doormat, and trimming back hedges and trees among other things.
  9. For Pet Owners – A special section just to remind you to do everything you can to get your pet’s scent (and evidence they live there) out of the house. We also have a post with some helpful tips for those selling a house with pets.
  10. Day of Showing – Similar to HGTV, here they suggest something to create a pleasant aroma in the house, tidying on the way out the door, and getting the heck out.

Home Staging Checklist #3

Our final home staging checklist is actually a pretty cool, interactive online checklist from Process.st, a process and workflow management tool. It allows you to check things off as you go and provides handy tips and photos. Their home staging checklist includes the following 13 areas:

  1. Record basic details
  2. Make any necessary repairs
  3. Paint the walls
  4. Arrange lighting
  5. Assess the view from all the windows
  6. Deal with wooden floors
  7. Stick to a colour theme
  8. Organize each room to serve one purpose
  9. Add headboards to beds
  10. Go “green”
  11. Kitchen
  12. Bathroom
  13. Exterior

Well, that’s it for our list of home staging checklists. I hope you found them useful. Lots of overlapping advice, which I think emphasizes the importance of a few key areas: decluttering and depersonalizing, fixing obvious defects, and emphasizing your house or condo’s strong points.

If you’d like some more customized advice, feel free to reach out. If you’re thinking of selling your home, be sure to check out our Property Concierge program. Through it, we use our money to renovate your home to get you more money from your sale. Our customers love it.