Whether you are home staging, painting a new apartment, or giving your house a makeover, color schemes can present a problem when giving your home a spruce. You want your space to have enough variety that it is interesting, but you don’t want it to look like you used every color in the Crayola box. Not only that, but the way you choose color can depend on the type of home you have and your reason for the makeover. This week at CORT we’re covering ways to re-color according your home’s needs. Read on for our best color scheme tips for houses, home staging, and apartments. Color Scheme Basics Ask yourself: How do you want the room to feel? Maybe you want your game room to be energizing, or you want a relaxing bedroom, or perhaps you want your living room to feel sophisticated and modern. What colors do you associate with those feelings? Also think about what colors you already like. Look at the clothes in your closet, for example, or draw inspiration from the colors of your favorite season. If you surround yourself with the colors you like, you’ll want to spend more time in the rooms with …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Choosing a Color Scheme for Your Home
When you are trying to sell your home, it is important to make it appear as spacious and inviting as possible. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a professional home stager, many homeowners opt to stage their homes themselves. If you decide to go this route, here’s how to staging your home on the cheap. In order to make the space look as large as possible, you should remove all extraneous furniture. Using an online self-storage finder, you can find affordable local storage for these items. In all likelihood, your home will be off the market in a month or two, so self-storage should not be a considerable expenditure. If your furniture is not particularly appealing, you may want to rent some more attractive items from CORT furniture rental or purchase clearance furniture. Placing that dilapidated bed frame in self-storage and renting a more lavish bed for a couple months may be an extremely cost effective strategy in the long run. It is also a good idea to purchase flower baskets and generic cooking books for the bathrooms and kitchen, respectively. Also, scented candles and modest soap baskets can also add nice touches to bathrooms. No matter what, it’s vital that you …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Home Staging on a Budget
Establishing curb appeal is an important part of the home staging process. After all, if a potential homebuyer isn’t impressed with the outside, it’s unlikely that they’re going to bother exploring the inside. Remove Clutter If your neighborhood is filled with kids, a bike in the yard may not be a deal breaker; however, generally speaking, you do not want your front yard and porch area filled with personal belongings. Moving can be a great opportunity to downsize, but if you don’t want to part with your bulky items; an online self-storage finder can help you locate an offsite storage locker. The Front Door A fresh coat of paint on the exterior can really go a long way, but if you don’t have the time or resources to paint the entire house, you should still apply a fresh layer to the front door. In many ways, the front door is the focal point of the home, so it’s important that it looks as inviting as possible. Consider replacing that old doorknob with a new door handle – perhaps something a bit more aesthetically appealing than a basic knob. Also, a wreath on the door looks great, especially in winter, …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Tips for Home Sellers: How to Generate Curb Appeal
Bringing the outdoors inside is not a new concept in interior design, but the recent resurgence of this beautiful trend has brought with it some stunningly lovely, creative, and even quirky innovations on this earthy classic. In this week’s furniture blog, we’re focusing on classic examples and new twists on incorporating the outdoors into your home staging, furniture rental and interior design. Photos While photos of outdoor scenes can be inspiring, home stagers and interior designers are playing with close-ups to make the outdoor experience more present in a room. Photos of natural patterns or shapes such as bark, moss, or leaf macros, framed simply, can add both earthiness and contemporary simplicity to a decor. Going Overboard Rather than accent your furniture rental pieces with a few plants here and there, try turning your living room or sunroom into a garden, with many hanging and potted plants. With a little planning, this can make a bold and artistic statement. Decorating with Non-Traditional Plants While potted plants are a household standard, people with a more contemporary style are finding grass, cacti, bamboo, or moss to be a nice alternative to the status quo. These can be potted or incorporated into wall …
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Your home staging efforts are almost complete. You’ve de-cluttered your main living areas. The front yard has that illustrious curb appeal. All of those extras are stored neatly out of sight–until a buyer wants to see the garage. The natural pit-stop for all things clutter-related, the garage is perhaps the most challenging room for home staging, because here, there’s nowhere left to hide. So how exactly do you stage a garage when it is being used for storage? In recent weeks the furniture blog has focused on home staging, so here are some tips for doing just that. First, get rid of anything you know won’t be kept. Go ahead and sell, donate, recycle or give away anything not being kept. Home staging will be much easier if you first reduce the volume of stored items by 50%. For those items left over, use the walls of the garage for storage. A large set of furniture rental shelves placed flush against the wall will house boxes while looking orderly. One secret of home staging is that anything that is well organized tends to blend in with the background. By that logic, find stacking boxes that are all the same shape, …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Home Staging Challenge: The Garage
Home staging for the exterior of a home is, of course, all about curb appeal. You want potential buyers to stop and come in, and making the exterior of the house pleasant and engaging will draw more people to do just that. Start at the Curb One way to start home staging is by literally stand at the curb and pretending you are a buyer. Make a list of anything that appears distracting or less than appealing. Your list will likely include things like edging the lawn, trimming trees, raking, pruning bushes, minor repairs and cleaning exterior surfaces. Notice everything from the condition of the mail box and house number to anthills and bare patches of grass. Plan to handle these items first. Unless you have done it recently, pressure washing the exterior is a home staging must. This brings a fresh, clean look to the house and prepares surfaces for a new layer of paint. Have windows professionally cleaned and paint doors and trim if necessary. Move to the Sides and Back of the House Repeat the same process on the back and sides of the house. Remove any old play equipment or unused fixtures or features such as …
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Building a great home staging portfolio goes beyond great room design. The right photograph of a beautiful room can make all the difference in selling a home and in selling yourself as a home staging expert. First, remember that the person looking at your portfolio is looking for staging that will sell. While fades, color washes and unusual angles may add to an artistic portfolio, a home staging portfolio needs to feature the simplicity, accessibility and potential of a space. Great home staging allows the buyer to envision themselves living in the home. Simple clean lines, neutral tones and engaging, well placed accents (in moderation) will allow this to happen. Over-styling, too much color and over-customization, on the other hand, is likely to turn a buyer off. Home staging photos should accentuate the simplicity of the room and its design. Here are some tips on how to achieve that winning home staging photo. Prepare well before taking your photo. Be sure that there is nothing that could clutter the visual field. While visual clutter certainly includes things like papers or extra accessories, it can also include a half-open blind or a large brown spot on a banana. In other words, …
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The hot summer months will have many of us inside at peak times of the day, lounging with a good book and an cold glass of iced tea. If you are a home stager, chances are, you’ll be reading about interior design or home staging tips. That’s because (let’s face it) home staging experts are a bit obsessed with making homes look welcoming and easy to embrace. Just for you, we have compiled a list of summer reading that should keep you inspired for years to come. If you haven’t already read her books, Barbara Jennings, a very successful home stager, has written some important books on the subject. Staging Portfolio Secrets is an excellent book about learning how to create a powerful portfolio that will both showcase your talents and have clients trust you and your work. Another of her books, Home Staging for Profit, covers every aspect of starting and growing a successful home staging business. Home stagers often have very little time to work with. Sometimes you only have a week or less to ready a house for buyers. You’re sure to appreciate Speed Decorating, by Jill Vegas. Transform any home at top speed through Jill’s useful …
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The difference between a house and a home is the life that goes on inside it. Whether you are a home staging expert or long time home owner, or have just arranged furniture rental for your first apartment, bringing the interior of your home to life is key. Plants and florals can provide just the touch needed to turn any interior space into a welcoming and vibrant home environment. Each plant brings a unique texture and quality to a room. A low tray filled with a subtle arrangement of moss and rocks placed on the surface of your furniture rental piece can bring a sense of serenity and peacefulness, while a palm can add lift and movement to a room. Plants can also substitute for art. If the mantel, staircase, or balcony lacks style, adding a climbing vine can transform these mundane features. Some designers use grass in a modern planter to bring a sleek, contemporary look to their furniture rental pieces. If work has you traveling and relying on furniture rental and quick home solutions, you may need something that requires comparatively less care. In that case, succulents are an excellent choice that many people overlook. Succulents do not …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Accenting Your Furnished Home with Florals and Plants
Hello CORT Furniture fans! Today we want to share a testimonial from Candy Dumas, owner of Sweet Interiors by Candy. Dumas is a prominent interior designer, home stager and design consultant from the Houston area who uses CORT Furniture for her home staging projects. As one of my main resources for staging projects, I find CORT Furniture to be an excellent resource for rental furniture. I use them for anything from a low budget to high end staging projects. CORT has more than exceeded my expectations with their awesome selection of quality furnishings and style, to their just-in-time deliveries & pick-ups. They come through each and every time making the process as stress-free as possible for both me and my clients. I am a home staging business owner with a partial staging inventory which I have built specifically around CORT’ Furniture pieces that compliment each other. I offer everything necessary to complete a turn-key staging project. However, I rely heavily on CORT to provide all the major furniture pieces for my projects therefore, giving me the ability to recommend a full service staging solution using a third party such as CORT. Furthermore, and more importantly to me, the customer service I receive …
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Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Candy Dumas’ Home Staging Experience with CORT
