The Basics of Staging a Living Room to Sell the House

The best moments of life happen in the living room – entertaining, partying, unwinding, and generally living. So, if you’re on the market to sell a listing, make sure the living space is the most stylish and coziest room in your home.  

Staging a living room is all about finding the right balance of decor, color, and scale. A thoughtful layout and deliberate design choices can take the living room from drab to fab.

Try out these easy, practical, and inexpensive tricks to make your potential buyers fall in love with your living room:  

Consider the shape and architecture of the living room‍

Before you place the furniture in the room, take a moment to look at the shape and architecture of the living room. Is it a square or a rectangle? Are there any weird-looking angles or corners? What’s the focal point(s)? Also, watch out for how the door and windows open and close. After considering all these, place your furniture properly while ensuring there is enough room for people to travel through comfortably around the room.  ‍

Declutter and keep the decor thin  ‍

Shelves and surfaces are the areas that are potentially more prone to appear cluttered. It’s always better to thin out the decor from the shelves if you want the living room to look stylish and sleek. Keeping the decor light also helps the buyer focus on the home without getting distracted by too many decor items. Moreover, thinning the decor makes the space feel larger and more open. ‍

Neutralize the color palette

When staging a living room, you cannot go wrong with warm, neutral paint colors. Giving the entire house a neutral makeover is one of the oldest tricks to sell the house faster because this color palette appeals to both men and women.

Neutral color walls are fabulous backdrops for anything of color or pattern you place against it - be it draperies, painting, rug, accessories, or furniture. The colors you add simply pops against the neutral backdrop.

Some of the neutral colors you can choose for the living room are taupe, beige, ivory, honey, butter, golden, coffee tones, blue-green, wheat, mossy green, brown, gray, and blue-gray.

If you want to make the room appear larger than it is, paint the walls the same color as the adjacent room. This creates a seamless transition from one room to another.

Make sure the furniture is to scale

The balance in the living room is probably one of the biggest problems in most homes. For example, big, bulky furniture in small rooms makes the room look cramped and small, lightweight furniture pieces in big spaces make the room look cold.

Cramped or cold rooms are very unwelcoming to the potential buyer. So, the best thing you could do is analyze the living room and find the right balance to make the room look more inviting and comfortable.

Create a conversation area

The conversation area in the living room mostly consists of a coffee table, sofa, and a chair or two. Arrange this seating around a natural focal point in the room, such as a mantle. The conversation areas in the living room make the space look welcoming, making people want to sit and relax. Don’t forget to add a couple of table lamps or a floor lamp to light up this area.

Play up the potential of the windows

Don’t hide the windows behind thick, heavy drapes. Keep it streamlined to allow natural light to come through – even if there’s no better view outside. If possible, try placing a mirror across from a window. The light that the mirror reflects will make the room look bigger.

Make minor repairs or fixes

Don’t leave any item broken that can be easily fixed. A loose doorknob, a squeaky floorboard, a wonky curtain rod – these are easy to fix, but if left as they are, they can look very shabby to the buyers. So, don’t overlook these small fixes and make sure the house is in top shape before you show it to potential buyers.

Add greenery

Plants add a warm, cheerful touch to the living room. It creates depth and makes the room look larger. Adding greenery to your entryway is a great idea to set the tone for the rest of your living area.  

Rug it

The main purpose of staging a living room is to make it look rich, cozy, and devoid of distractions. A rug is a must-have as it adds warmth, pattern, color, and texture to a living room. Rugs can be used to define spaces and unify the furniture.

For example, you use a rug in the conversation area of the living room to define the space. You can also use two different rugs to separate spaces in a room.  

Staging a Living Room – Traditional Staging Vs. Virtual Staging

Real estate agents find it difficult to sell empty homes or those with shabby or outdated furnishing quickly and for the desired price. So, it becomes essential for them to stage the house with beautiful interiors to boost the imagination of their potential buyers. But traditional home staging is a laborious process - clean up the space, color the walls, place the real furniture and decor items, and get a professional photographer to shoot the place. This is a huge cost, effort, and time investment that most real estate agents don’t have the budget for. So, what’s the closest alternative to catch prospects’ attention and make them itch to write that offer? Virtual staging.

Real estate agents hire a 3D studio for virtual staging is increasingly becoming popular because it promises great results with minimum time, effort, and money investment. While traditional home staging costs $7,000-30,000 on average, virtual staging costs just $16-100 per image.

Virtually staging creates photorealistic images of the rooms with beautiful interiors, thus saving time, effort, and money. A professional virtual staging studio, like Styldod, can create beautiful, photorealistic images in just 24 hours at only $16 per image.

Want to know the basics of virtual staging and how companies like Styldod can help sell your listing? This guide is all you need.