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Secrets of home stagers: Six easy fixes to make you like your house better

Home stagers are the people who sweep through homes going on the market and make them look uncluttered and cozy without a huge investment of time or money.

What’s their secret?

Stagers have a bag of design and organizing tricks that can be useful even to someone who has no plans to sell. They look to make a house or condo desirable to potential buyers and maximize price. They have practical ideas to refresh your stale living room or pump up your curb appeal. Stagers cast a critical eye on everything. They remove things. They group like items together, rearrange bookcases, toss out lumpy pillows and frame children’s artwork previously hanging from magnets on the fridge. They might gather all your scattered framed family photos, edit them and display them on one shelf or tabletop.

Here are six ideas from four local stagers to get you started on an intervention in your own home.

1. Create a light and airy bedroom

“Lots of bedrooms are small and have few windows,” says Tyler Whitmore, owner of Bethesda staging and design firm Ta-da! Homes. She suggests painting walls a light color and bringing in a neutral rug. Beds are the largest piece in the room, so linens shouldn’t stand out too much, she says. On a recent job at a Bethesda Cape Cod, Whitmore replaced a dark navy bedspread on a mahogany sleigh bed with a cream coverlet. The navy one, Whitmore says, “created a big black hole in the middle of the room.” Replacing chunky, mismatched nightstands, she installed matching pedestal nightstands, reusing the existing crackled-glass lamps. She put a pair of framed European prints over the bed as a focal point. “It feels calm in here now,” Whitmore says. “It’s the retreat everyone is looking for.”

Whitmore will join us for our Home Front chat about home staging and interior design. Join us August 28 at 11 a.m.

2. Give the bathroom a facelift

Laura McCaffrey, a home stager in the District, sees lots of unusual bathroom tile color combinations in Washington’s 1920s and 1930s houses: yellow and black, gray and maroon, pink and green. Yes, it’s retro, but with age, tiles crack and bathtubs chip. Many homeowners don’t want to shell out big bucks to gut their bathrooms. So to update them, she swears by Miracle Method, a service that sprays an acrylic, usually white, coating that bonds to existing tile and tub in a layering process not unlike painting techniques used in the automotive industry. Broken or cracked tiles can also be repaired and sprayed. According to Mary Ann O’Hara from Miracle Method’s Kensington franchise, a standard bathroom tub and tile surface refinishing costs about $1,900. You can add a new vanity, a medicine cabinet and hardware for an additional charge. New floor tiles can be laid on top of existing tile by a professional Floors Installer. And then you don’t have to hunt for yellow and black towels or shower curtains.

3. Make a good first impression

Your front door and shutters welcome people to your home and should be painted regularly to look fresh and polished. Front doors are traditionally painted colors such as glossy black, barn red, forest green or white. Whitmore also likes the idea of painting the front door in a color that will hint at what is inside.

McCaffrey is fond of giving the front door an unexpected color. She encourages clients not to match the colors of shutters and front doors. In one project on a brick Colonial in Washington’s American University Park neighborhood, she found a front door and shutters both painted a sage green. McCaffrey chose a darker green to paint the shutters so that they stand out.

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Mary DeRose Davis

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