The house in Atlanta was big and nice and very bland.
Periodically, I turned to my husband and said, "The builder's beige paint on the walls is boring. I want color." He replied, "No, no, we are going move to North Carolina someday. We'll have interesting colors on the walls there." Well, okay, we don't want to waste money here that we can spend and enjoy there. Good point. End of discussion.
Or, I said, "The disco-eighties furniture is in great shape. But it is old. I want to buy new furniture." To which, he spoke: "The new house will have new furniture. We don't want to have to spend a lot of money moving new furniture to NC." Good point.
The huge wall of windows in the great room, dressed with blinds only, was boring, it irritated me. Yes, but we would have nice window treatments in NC. End of discussion.
And, he was correct. The new house is just colorful enough. The new furniture is contemporary. The new house, the retirement house, is delightful.
Anyway, in November, 2007, I was eligible for an early retirement in Atlanta. The new house in North Carolina was built and waiting for our monthly visits. My husband suggested we go for it. His company approved his working remotely. He, the cats, and most of our belongings moved to NC. I remained in Atlanta to sell the house there and work until my retirement.
We packed all the good furniture, left the old stuff. We packed all the tschotchkes, most of the clothing, basically everything but the junk and what I needed to live. Loaded it all on a truck and away we went to NC. While we were away, we arranged to have the interior of the whole house repainted...in the same builder's beige - no need to play with color now, we were leaving.
I told the boss I was going to retire - would let him know the date as soon as I sold the house. The housing market was already on the way down. The boss, being a great boss, congratulated me on my plans. He told me later he figured it could be a year before I left. At the office, my team rearranged our work schedules so I could work in Atlanta three long days, drive to NC, spend four days with my family, then high-tail it back to the office. Good friends, good bosses, and great teammates are a gift to be cherished.
In Atlanta, I cleaned up what remained in the house: furniture we no longer needed, a few pots and pans, the inevitable and ever-increasing pile of books. Preparing to list the property, the realtor took pictures to put on the Internet.
The next day, the realtor called me at work. He explained that he, and most of the agents in the office, had looked at the pictures and had concerns: the walls were too beige, too boring; the furniture was too old, the windows too blank. Anyone shopping for a home on the Internet would take one look, shudder, and move on.
The realtor wanted to bring a Stager out to my house....Let's be honest, the realtor's boss had told him he was going to bring a Stager. He, my realtor, had no clue what those words meant. He did know he and I were going to split the cost. I said, okay, and we set a date.
Then I stood up at my desk and shouted so everyone in the office could hear, "I just flunked the HGTV test!" Fade-out on general laughter.
The Stager was professional, knowledgeable, and had a great sense of humor. For four hours he walked room-by-room through my house and and all around the yard. He told me what needed to be done to make the house eye-catching both on the Internet and when potential buyers inspected it. I trailed along taking pages and pages of notes, asking question after question. The realtor, a third wheel with a learning curve of his own, followed us both.
The walls were too bland, the Stager pulled out a flip book of paint colors and suggested repainting in....this color. The realtor grinned and said that color is really popular now. The furniture was totally dated. Eclectic-contemporary furniture was needed. The Stager had furniture available for rental. We needed accessories to give life and elegance to the rooms. The Stager had those too. The huge wall of windows in the great room should have been a selling point. Instead it was a detriment. The Stager could arrange a window treatment to jazz it up, make it what it ought to be.
In the end, the Stager gave me a verbal estimate of what it would cost to have his company do all the work, then rent me the furniture and accessories. The figure was startling.
My husband, when told the figure, more or less had heart failure.
But hey, I'm a creative person. I can do it myself?
Can't I?
Well, I've never met a challenge I didn't like...this one looked like a doozie.
I bought a book. Got a Home Inspection. I condensed the pages of notes. Included the items from the Home Inspection. Combined and revised it all down to a list of action items.
I chose a paint color similar to but more intense than what the Stager suggested - I was not about to repaint the whole house, and I figured a deeper/richer color in small areas would fill the space almost as well. The color I selected was a green-brown that went well with builder's beige.
I stuck a sign in the yard - furniture, cheap. Disco-eighties was gone in a few hours.
Then I walked around the almost-empty house crying because in spite of the book and the very valuable information from the Stager, I didn't get it. I wondered if this was one challenge I was going to fail.
A few days later, with an unbelievable feeling of relief, I realized what I needed to do. I had to stop looking at my house as a house and at the furnishings as furnishings. I had to look at it as a three-dimensional painting. I use a lot of negative space when I paint: I let the balance and shape of the empty spaces around the landscape' trees/mountains or floral arrangements define the picture. All I had to do was treat the furniture and accessories as if they were the part I was painting and treat the room itself as the empty space. I needed balance, I needed color and shape in certain places. Everywhere else, the negative space, the room, would sell itself.
I got it.
Man, was I energized!
I called the totally wonderful contractor we have worked with for 20 years and seven houses, and said, how fast can you get a team together and get out here? I emailed the Staging to-do list to him so he could build the right team.
I told my husband I would not be coming up to visit that week. Which was okay, he was traveling on business anyway. My sister took care of the cats.
I bought yards and yards of drapery fabric - some in a color that was almost the same as the wall paint, some in a slightly contrasting color/design. The Internet told me how to make impressive, yet inexpensive, valences. Wal*Mart provided sheers in complementary colors. I made window treatments.
For two of the happiest days of my life that contractor's team tore into my Staging to-do list. Mulch around plants, add shrubs to build outdoor vignettes in a few key places in the yard, paint accent walls in key rooms, paint a glorious strip of my rich color up from the fireplace to the ceiling then surround it with crisp white molding, pressure wash the exterior, repair the dozen small items on the Home Inspection report, hang the valences and sheers....item after item dropped off the list.
I painted the wall color on some of the remaining furniture. I bought some big vases with simple, interesting shapes and painted them the wall color. giggle, I painted the knife block in the kitchen. I gently carried the accent wall color around the house.
I visited several companies and rented a few pieces of furniture in a deep, rich, contemporary brown that was totally perfect with the paint.
The following week, when I visited NC, I packed up and brought back a few end tables I had rescued from a neighbor's trash pile a year or so before, some flat rectangular wooden frames my brother-in-law made for me, and some blank canvases I had never gotten around to painting.
On the way back to Atlanta, I stopped at an outlet mall on the way and purchased shower curtains, bath accessories, lamps, and a few really big, really red decorative bowls and matching vases - just the punch of color needed to make the negative space in my "painting" pop.
I bought a staple gun and stapled the drapery fabric I had used to make valences onto the wooden frames. I stapled padding and the same fabric onto the top of a chest. Then I painted the canvases with the wall paint and edged them with a brown that matched the furniture. Hung in strategic, empty places, this wall art carried the color and pattern around the whole house without being intrusive.
I knew I really had "gotten it" when I emailed photos to my teammates. They complimented the shape of the rooms, the way the rooms flowed together, the beauty of the rooms; NOT the furniture, the tschotchkes, the wall art. I did it! They saw the beauty of the negative space!
In all, because of my traveling and working time, and because of my learning curve, it took a month for me to Stage my house.
We had a contract two weeks later.
And I was hooked. I wanted to do it again.
