Featured Art: Urban Titan Wall Art by Joshua Schicker available from Great Big Canvas

Easy Home Staging Tips & Art Inspiration

Make your house take center stage with four easy home staging tips buyers will love.

Selling you or your client’s house is all about creating a blank canvas for the new homeowner to draw their own life. In the most recent National Association of Realtors, 83% of agent reported that staging a house made it easier for their buyers to envision it as their future home¹. Helping your buyer’s picture their future home in your house can help you sell faster and make more profit from your sale.

Creating a blank canvas doesn’t mean a house full of blank, white walls. Including art can help show your potential buyer how to use the space or help show of your house's best assets. Always affordable fine art options make Great Big Canvas a ‘great’ place to pick up all the home staging art you need to guarantee a successful sale. And when you buy art prints online through Great Big Canvas, everything you need to hang your new canvas or framed art is included, so you can hang it and get ready to sell right away!

There’s more to home staging than just art however, so we’ve combed our resources to find four essential tips to help you get a head start on prepping your house for selling:

Declutter Your Decor

The first step with any home staging might be the simplest, but the most daunting to those who identify with the pack rat nature. Decluttering each room is essential in creating an environment where your prospective buyer can picture their life in the home. Decluttering creates visual harmony and a soothing, relaxing environment to allow homebuyers to absorb all your house’s great features. This means going beyond just tidying up the living room coffee table. You’ll need to create a throughline of visual harmony throughout the house, and remove any personal notes. To do so, walk through the home and create a list of your personalized decor. Now is the time to paint over strong accent walls, remove those glow-in-the-dark stickers from the second bedroom, and winnow out the unused supplies from the craft closet.

Market Remnants I by Jennifer Goldberger available from Great Big Canvas

If you’re still living in the house while staging it for the buyer, try adding more storage features to keep a functional clutter-free look. Keep the entryway clear by storing shoes under a bench and install easy removable hooks to hang coats and purses. Add storage baskets or opaque bins on your shelves for the essentials instead of storing items loose (these will also make the shelves content easier to carry when it’s time to move out). Go ahead and pack up any unique wall art and think about replacing it with neutral abstract wall art, with uniform frames or coordinating canvas wall art in every room to enhance visual unity.

Bring in Light

Most open house showings take place around midday to late afternoon. Take advantage of this time of day by letting in your best feature: light. Afternoon light provides a warm If the house has blinds, ensure they are drawn up or leave them as open as possible. Remove any heavy window dressings and replace them with semi-sheer curtains. Sheer voile, linen, or even lace curtains can fit the bill, so you can customize the new curtains to any room style. If you do have some perfectly coordinated drapery, make sure it’s pulled back or gathered stylishly with coordinating curtain pulls.

For those rooms, or even entire houses, where it is just not possible to access natural light, there are a few tricks you can rely on Using brighter white bulbs in your light fixtures, to mimic sunlight, can create a more welcoming feel to a darker room. Additionally, large canvas wall art in warm or light neutral tones can open up a space to provide the same organic feeling that natural light brings.

Creamy Neutral II by Chris Paschke available from Great Big Canvas

When taking photos of your house, it is essential to capture each room with the best lighting. Conversely to your approach to an open house, morning light is the best. The cool, bright early morning rays will best showcase each rooms attributes when your post your listing. For south or east facing houses, shooting anytime between sunrise to 10:00 am is best. For north facing houses, shoot between 10:00am - 2:00pm. For west facing houses, try to shoot as early in the afternoon as you can get away with (or try some of the tips above to artificially add in a ‘natural’ light look).

Prioritize Curbside Appeal

Speaking of photography - trimming the outside of your house is just as important and creating internal visual harmony. Creating an attractive exterior will both improve your online listing as well as improve chances of getting interested walk-ins for your open house. More than just cutting the grass, use the yard as yet another place to fan the buyer’s imagination when picturing their life here. Create an oasis of soothing greenery and warm inviting local flora. (Showing your house in the off season? Get creative with variegated, leafy ground cover local to your area.)

Linen Tropical Silhouette I by June Vess available from Great Big Canvas

Don’t have much of a yard? Create the same inviting feeling by incorporating garden wall art in your entryway. A series of botanical framed prints, earth tone abstract wall art, or a large scale landscape canvas art will bring in the organic touch to welcome buyers into their future home.

Focus on the Little Things

If you’ve already decluttered and have your lighting optimized, it’s time to move on to what fills the rooms themselves. Your furniture and room decor should highlight the home’s features, speak toward current trends, yet be understated enough not to overpower the buyer’s personal styles. No need to reupholster the dining room chairs or reoutfit your den. Getting a quick refresher course on current home decor trends will serve you well in updating your house’s interior with small touches that’ll have a big impact.

Often just updating the wall art and accessories will go much further in refreshing your room’s appeal than changing out all the furniture. Keep your color palette light and airy. This will lend an aspirational look to any room and allow the buyer to better picture their own furniture in this space. Abstract wall art is another great option, which provides an elegant look without making the style too specific to put off the buyer.

BluePaint, Balance, & Navy Blue Watercolor Strokes by Urban Epiphany available from Great Big Canvas