The Busy New Parents: Packing & Styling

Jamie and his family were extremely busy with a toddler, visiting grandparents, and a newborn baby smack dab in the middle of a move to the coast. Enough said?

Jamie found us through a google search and called to see if we were able to come in and help his family pack up all of their home and prepare it for photos with light staging. With a baby and toddler, they still needed life to be easy for them while the house was selling, but wanted to minimize the clutter and get a head start on packing for the big move. Not only that, but with the photographer coming the next week, they wanted our eye for design when it came to staging what was left – using only their existing decor and furniture.

Mission accepted!

Before

After

Veronica and I clocked in 12 man-hours in the 1 day and transformed this home from ‘lived in with a baby and toddler’ to ‘show ready’.

To begin, we worked closely with the family to determine what was needed over the next couple of months in case the house didn’t sell immediately in terms of toys and supplies. From there we packed everything else away carefully into boxes and stored them in the basement storage room. We worked our way room by room packing all non-essentials and clearing the way for staging.

Once the house was down to the bare necessities of function and decor, we organized and staged each room to give the family a baseline for how they needed to keep the home for photos. Veronica worked through their daughters bedroom, packing away all of the clothes that she had outgrown, and also the clothes that she would not yet grow into in the time that they were in the house – leaving only what she would fit (and was weather appropriate) until moving day. She then organized the closet so it looked tidy for showings and was easy to navigate for the family.

But staging is not just packing and organizing and arranging things on shelves (which of course we also did). The living room, while functional, was not set up in a way that offered a wonderful first impression when a potential buyer came in the door – it was cut in half with a couch, of which you saw the back of. So I rearranged the entire living room so that it opened up the space and was a more welcoming environment for first impressions and to really showcase the big beautiful windows and the size of the family room. We carried all additional furniture down into storage so the room did not look too overcrowded (which can make it appear smaller).

Lastly, after all the rooms had been packed and staged, we organized all of the dishes in the kitchen cupboards so that potential buyers could see clean and organized cupboards that properly showed them off and reflected positively on the lifestyle of the home.

Mission accomplished!

Staging Details

Jamie and his family were wonderful to work with and very appreciative of the work that we did to help prepare his family for their big move.

See their full testimonial on our testimonials page.