Recent Client Work

I thought I would share a few pics of a job that I have been working on lately. Linda has a beautiful home, but wanted some fresh updates throughout the space. We are working room by room and we started by tackling her dining room built-ins. She just needed some "staging" help to make her shelves make sense.
Here is one of the shelves before:

We pulled all of her blue pieces from around the house and made a collection on the shelves. She also had some great vintage and coffee table books that help add dimension! Just some simple changes.

 Here is a view of both shelves before:

We took away the fake plants and used the same blue collection from throughout the house on the right hand shelves as well. The chairs were set up for a party, but you get the idea. And by using some fresh blue flowers we pulled the blue from the shelves to the center of the room as well.

Next we moved on to the living area. I made a few new pillows to replace the dark and dated ones that she had...I had a helper while measuring :)

I paired the pretty brown, cream and blue print with a complimentary stripe to add some dimension to the pillows. Natural piping finished off the look:

 I am THE WORST at getting "before" pictures, but here is an after with the new pillows and some fresh lillies! We also replaced a dark throw blanket with a bright cream one.

We are still working on this room in terms of art and placement, but it is already freshened up!

Placing two slender lamps on the console behind the couch adds some needed lighting. Eventually a taller and skinnier art piece will be here to complete the vignette!

I'll be sure to update you as we work through this beautiful house! Thank you Linda for letting me share how small changes can make a big difference!

Accessorizing: How to build a vingette

There are lots of "rules" out there about building a proper vingette, that detail how many items it should include, heights of the items, sizes of items, etc... But I think this all depends on the space in question, the style of the room, and type of items being displayed. I usually play it by ear and build each space as I go, but I do keep a few things in mind:

1. Use varying heights to create interest

2. Use different textures

3. Keep in mind that too many colors will start to look sloppy

With large built-ins like these, accessorizing can be a challenge. So I take it shelf-by-shelf.

I thought I would focus on the right side of the shelves to show you my process. I picked the shelf with some of my milk glass collection.

 I broke this shelf into two sides, the left and the right. Doing this makes them easier to tackle!
I began with one of my favorite pieces in this room, my chinese book ends that I found at a consignment store. The milky blue color was great for the room. I paired their subtle color with some brighter, complimentary-colored books that I own. My grandfather gave me his vintage gardening book a few months before he passed away. Those items pretty much took care of the left-hand side.

Next I turned to the right side. I decided to use my milk glass to balance out the color with some white so as not to make the shelf too busy. I chose a fairly short and substantial piece first.

Then I went for a taller, more slender piece for some contrast.

Finally, I used an even shorter piece to round out the trio. You could say that I used the pretty standard vignette rules on this side of the shelf (three items, varying in size, similar style).

And this is the final product! By breaking up the shelf into two sections, I didn't get overwhelmed and also didn't under or over accessorize!

I hope this helped you understand my process on this. I hear so often that people don't know where to start, and accessorizing shelves is my number one request when staging, so I know that it can be a challenge! Do you have any spots in your house that you scratch your head over when accessorizing?

Design Work Sneak Peek

I wanted to give you a little look at the office that I am working on. I am hoping to get several before/afters of this house posted soon. I showed you a little bit of the den HERE.

This is a side wall in the office. We needed file storage but also needed a nice furniture piece since this is the first room that you see when you walk in the front door. So I chose this double file cabinet from Ballard. We also needed something to sit over the file storage, and this cotton canvas painting by Hillary Butler was perfect. She tweaked the colors a little to fit our scheme. You can see more of her beautiful pieces HERE. The accessories are all from different places around town, but look great paired together!

Before and After Staging

I realized that I haven't posted any staging pics lately, so I am going to try to do better about that.  The truth is that sometimes I forget to take "before" pics when I am performing my staging magic, so I don't always have any to share.  I am trying to do better about that as well.

I had the opportunity to recently help with a true bachelor pad.  It was a small but charming house that just had some really quirky aspects, the biggest being the master bath.  Take a look...who puts a tub in the middle of the room??  And a mirror with no vanity underneath?  Throw in some really old light fixtures and random shelves/towel racks everywhere, and this is what you get:

And here is the after:

Moving the white cabinet under the awkwardly placed mirror really helped balance the room.  Matching bath mats also helped.  Taking away the old towel rack and putting in an updated ring version along with new, updated lighting really helped as well!   But the biggest impact was the simplest...just opening up that shower curtain to get rid of the big white blob in the middle of the room!
Another awkward feature of the room was the front 2 rooms.  One seemed to be a dining room but was being used as an office, and the front living room was being used as a dining room.  No one wants to walk in to an office, so we switched things up a bit.

 Here is the after...we made it a true dining room to eliminate questions of what to do with the room.

To the right was the living room being used as a dining room.  We needed to try to at least give the idea that it could be used as a living space.

Here is the after.  Even adding a couple of chairs and a rug automatically changes the purpose and feel of the room.  You don't always need a full room of furniture to get the effect that you are looking for.

The guest bedroom was also challenging because of its small size and the fact that it was also being used to store a drum set.

After moving the set out and getting some bedding on the bed instead of clothes, the room looks 100 times better!!  With no drums it is easy to see the true size of the room.  Also notice throughout all of the pics how simply opening blinds makes a huge difference in the mood of the room.

 You can see the entire listing for this home HERE or click on any of the after pics to take you to the source.

Before and After picture magic

When staging a home, I always tell the homeowner that one of the most important parts of having your house on the market is how it looks online. It can be staged to perfection, but with bad lighting/angles, it can look terrible as an online listing. I wanted to share a few examples of how important these are.
Here is a before picture of a living room I recently staged. The angle is OK but without a wide angle lense, it is really hard to see the true size of the room. Also, the rug and other items in the room are pretty dated and the buyers in this area are young couples looking for their first home.

Here is an after shot with a wide angle lense by a professional photographer. It is from the other corner of the room, but you get the idea. We added some easy updates (new rug and side chair from Overstock.com, coffee table from Target, and art from Garden Ridge) and it's like a new room! We also opened the curtains to bring in the natural light, as well as removed the door to the den off of the dining room. This helps give the house a more open floor plan and better flow, which is what buyers are looking for these days. The house was listed using the first picture and was on the market for quite some time without selling. After staging and new pics, it sold in a couple of months in a terrible market!

These next sets of pics are from an empty house that I recently staged. They show how important furniture is when selling a home. It gives buyers ideas and helps them picture their own things in the space.

This is a before shot with a regular camera of a den area. It is really hard to tell how much furniture can really fit in the room. You would easily pass it up when browsing listings online.

Here is the after with the professional wide angle. We didn't over-do the furniture, but gave it enough to show how much room there really is. We also covered up the ugly wires from a previous TV setup with a mirror from the bedroom dresser! It was the perfect size.

This is a before of the master. Boring. And hard to tell how large it really is.

Here is the after. With just a king sized bed, side table, and dresser it is a whole new room!

Here is the main living room. It is a huge space and we just wanted to showcase its potential with a few key pieces.

Here is the after with furniture. Doesn't it feel so much cozier and inviting than before!

This is a before of that room from another angle.

And here is the view when you walk in the home now. We didn't over-saturate the room with furniture and accessories, but filled it with enough to make it feel like a home.

If you are selling a home and you have already moved, investing a little in renting some furniture pieces can make all the difference in the world. If you are still in the house, investing in a few pieces to update the space is well worth it. These before and afters really show how important staging along with quality pictures help a home stand out among all of the listings online!

Sneak Peek...the den

Last week, I shared some pictures/ideas from a project that I am working on. I thought I would also share our progress in the den so far. And I even have a mid-way point picture so you can see how far we've come! This is an awesome den with a wood-burning fireplace and ridiculously high ceilings. The problem lies in the fact that it currently isn't being used. And with winter coming soon, the homeowners really want to enjoy the fireplace. So, we came to the conclusion that a TV was pretty much a necessity if anyone was actually going to hang out in there. This helped to figure furniture position and function.
The idea for this room: to create continuity between the grays in the fireplace stone and the gold on the wall while opening up the room and keeping it casual. Here are a couple of pics of the room when we started.

Here is the plan: Grays, golds, and browns in some really fun prints. The damask will be window treatments with the other two fabrics as pillows. And the daimond pattern will be an awesome new rug! We will be reusing the leather couch from the living room. We also will need a media table for the TV and the plan is to also have two smaller sitting chairs to stay in front of the table for extra seating when entertaining.

 

And here is a work in progress picture of what is going on so far. We are still missing the draperies as well as some pillows, but the room is already looking great! Once it is complete I will post the updated pics!

We decided to mount the TV on the wall and hide all of the cables/wires in the other room, which is just a mud room. So no messy accessories! The coffee table is a piece that is special to the family that was also taken from the living room. We will give it some fun accessories to help update its look a little!

Look for more updates soon!

Back From Summer...err...Fall Break!

So, I know you probably gave up on me ever blogging again, but I'm back! The truth is, I've been extremely busy with lots of good stuff, and I decided to take the Summer off from blogging...which turned into part of Fall as well!
For this post, I wanted to share a little about what I have been working on. Last Spring, I had the privilege of staging a home here in Memphis for a great couple who welcomed me into their life like we were old friends! I was pretty new to town and I really appreciated their friendship. We have stayed great friends since then, and after their house sold, they purchased a BEAUTIFUL new home! It is fairly new construction with some rustic/natural touches, which is totally them.
The problem was, it was decorated with a mixture of the old homeowner's over-the-top formal decor and their own furniture that was a mix of things from before the two were married.
They were ready for a total makeover to fit them and their home, and I was flattered that they asked me to help!
It is a big house with big rooms, but we are trying to tackle a room at a time and so far we are finding some great things!
First up is their living room:

This room has an entire wall of french doors (which was quite the challenge) and has some great custom touches. You can see though that the curtains are a bit much for the laid-back feel of the house, and the furniture could use some sprucing-up. Don't worry though, we are re-using this couch in another space!

Here is another view of the windows. These are stationary panels that don't actually function, just for show. Our plan was to create new panels that would sit in the same place, but could pull across the doors for privacy.

This is a view of the living room looking at the fireplace. This couch will be replaced by a chocolate sectional that sits on the far right wall and turns to face the fireplace. This will give them functional seating and make the most of this long room! We will also get a new, leather recliner to sit in front of the window wall. A new rug and a couple of small chairs to flank the fireplace will give this room almost 2 times the current seating! And it still will feel bigger than it does now!

This is one of my inspiration fabrics to be used for throw pillows. It was a bit of a splurge but is so soft and the colors are absolutely beautiful!

The top fabric will be the new drapes (I got it for a steal...and actually bought all that was left, possibly in the whole world...I couldn't find it anywhere else!). The bottom fabric will be more throw pillows.

This is the inspiration board that I put together for the homeowners. They loved it! And so do I! I think it is perfectly sophisticated/casual, which is exactly what they are!

There will be more to come soon and I will also post some pics of our progress! I have also been working on some projects around my own house that I will post soon!

Great Cordova House For Sale!

I wanted to share a house with all of you that just went on the market in Cordova. I helped them with alot of the staging and it is a great house! It has been really well maintained and they have added a lot of character with some great flooring updates and an extra bonus room upstairs! Here are a couple of pics from its listing on FSBO.com.

This is the front of the house. Very cute!

This is the very large master bedroom

This is the dining room. It is a great size!

This would make a great starter home for someone just married or just starting a family!

Check out the listing and all of the details HERE.

How a few changes make a big difference!

Home staging means different things for different homes. Sometimes it is new paint/furniture/accessories, sometimes it is pretty accent pillows, vases, and rugs, and sometimes it is something as simple as camera angles (80% of buyers decide if they want to see a house by pre-shopping onlilne) and furniture placement. These are a couple of examples of this; when small changes make big differences.
This is a really great home that I recently had a consult for in Germantown. They had great neutral walls, furniture, etc... But when looking at the pictures online, the house looked cramped, crowded, and small. When I got to the house I realized that none of these things were true. The homeowner didn't want to move anything to storage or spend much on new things, so we worked on what we had.

This was a view of the den/family room area. It was a great space that was connected to the kitchen, but the couch placement completely blocked the flow of the room, and the counter in the picture made it hard to tell how much space was actually in the room.

Here is an after pic. The room looks so much bigger! The counter is out of the picture and we have re-arranged the couches without moving anything out of the room.

Here is another view of the room. You can see the same problem. It looks like the eat-in area is forced into the space, and the size of the room is really hard to estimate.


This is the after pic. We have kept most of the table out of site and it is easy to see how much space is in the room!



Here is a bedroom in the same house. It is really personal with lots of pics that clutter the room and make it way too personal. Also, there is NO color anywhere!

In this after pic, you can see how easily a colorful bedspread and a couple of pillows bring so much color into the room! Also, removing all of the personal pics and replacing them with one neutral wall hanging helps put the attention back onto the room, not the homeowner's things.

This is a room in an East Memphis home that was used as a home office/yankees shrine/doggie home/etc... For buyers, you want to give your room one main purpose so that it is easy for them to picture what they would use the room for.

You can see we just removed all of the personal wall hangings and clutter, most of the unnecessary furniture, and re-positioned what was left to give the room a purpose. We also hid the doggie home so that it wasn't so prominent in the room. (Side note: this home sold the first day on the market! :)

Often times it just takes a pair of fresh eyes to come in and see the possibilities that your home holds! That is why staging your home before putting it on the market is so important!!