Spring is traditionally the strongest time of year to sell your home. If you want to sell, you need to get your home ready. You want to win the beauty pageant. The place to start, before you list your home for sale, is with proper home staging. The way you live in your home and the way you sell your home are two different things. It does add a layer of care to your already busy life, but it will payoff when you sell by getting your home sold more quickly and by helping you to get the best price possible.
Start by standing out at the street. This is your buyer’s first impression. Can you see the front door? Can you see all of the windows? Is the lawn green? Are flower beds free of weeds and bushes nicely trimmed? What about the color of the paint? Is it one of the popular shades used today or something from when you moved in in 1996? Is the roof clean and free of moss? If you said no to any of these questions, then you’ve got work to do. Too often homeowners let trees and bushes become over grown and drown the house. Over-growth makes you house look like a big blob. Do you want to buy a blob? Neither does a buyer.
Next stand at your front door. I believe this is the most critical moment for a buyer. Remember that they will pause here for a minute or two while the Realtor gets the key from the lockbox and opens the door. Your buyer will have time to look around and get a close-up look at everything around the front door. I truly believe that they make a decision at this point. If they like what they see, they will enter the house with a positive attitude and look for positive input to reinforce what they already believe. If they get a bad impression, they’ll be critical as they go inside and look to find fault; again to reinforce what they already have decided. The front door is usually a small area. Here is what you need to do. Wash or freshly paint the front door and the windows around the door. Sweep or pressure wash all of the walls and ceiling around the door to get rid of spiders, webs, moths, and bug stuff. Scrub the weather stripping at the threshold so that there is not one speck of grime. Make sure weather stripping is in good shape, but that the door opens and closes easily. Make sure the lock works! Now add some color. A couple of pots with flowers, a wreath on the front door. Please, no holiday decorations that are months old, or pots of dead easter lillies. Splurge and spend $20 on some nice flowers, then be sure to water them.
You’ve done it! You’ve gotten your buyer inside.
You are moving, right? Why not get a leg up on the job and start packing BEFORE you put your house up for sale. You want to de-personalize your home. Take down personal momentos, collections, most family photos, all of the stuff on the refrigerator. It should be like a model home that you want to move right into. And all of your very personal stuff keeps your buyer from feeling like it is “their” house. I recommend that you do this one room at a time. Just make a big pile in the middle of the room that you want to either store or donate/toss. It is ok to have a few family photos. For instance, a bookshelf with a combination of a few framed photos, some books, perhaps a small piece of art work or decorative glass, that is fine. But that hallway photo gallery showing Joey, who is now 35, in every grade of school he ever attended: take it down.
Less truly is more. As you clean out clutter and stream-line each room, you will make them look larger. A small home, well staged, can look bigger than large home full of clutter.
This is also true of furniture. Make sure you store away anything that gets in the way in hallways, at the top of stairs, as you enter rooms, and on stairway landings. The fact that you had no where else to put the furniture just screams “This house is too small!”. In addition, they could actually be a safety hazzard when you have a group of people seeing the house together and unable to maneuver on the stairs. Another important thought with furniture is do not cover up a homes features. Don’t place TV’s in front of windows, or dressers across closets, or a couch across the fireplace. Move the furniture around and show off each rooms best feature. Make sure to not have too much furniture. A few pieces in each room is all you need. For a living room: a couch, a chair, a love seat, and a coffee or similar table is plenty. If you have a piano, don’t be afraid to store the couch or the love seat. You want the room to feel big and not to be dwarfed by the furniture.
The kitchen and bathroom counters are the toughest to empty and also the most important. Many a buyer has ruled out a home because either the kitchen or the bathrooms seemed too small. You can make them big, with a little effort. As much as possible, but things away in cupboards. A few things may be impossible to put away because they are constantly in use. Hello? The coffee pot? With things you just have to have handy, cluster them into one group. So if you have the coffee pot, the decorative decanter of olive oil, and the pepper mill tastefully gathered in one corner, and nothing else anywhere on the counter, you’ll get away with it. Take away the cluster and string the three items around the kitchen and suddenly you got clutter. Bunching is a wonderful thing. The same thing holds true in the bathroom. I also highly recommend baskets or decorative boxes. If you use a container, you can pretty much fill the container and still keep things attractive.
The areas to focus your attention are: the entry, the living room, the dining room, the family room, the kitchen, and the master bedroom and bath. Do the whole house if you can, it will pay off. But if you have limits to your ability to take on this project, at a minimum, get to these rooms.
Now for those of you who are after the best money and the quickest sale, you’ll take it to the next level. Clean out closets and fold and stack everything in an orderly and tidy fashion. Get your kids on board helping you. Those big tubs that are made to hold toys are great. Tell them that when they are finished playing, just throw everything in the tub. It makes for a pretty quick clean up. Go around the house and wash all of the windows and clean out all of the window tracks. The pickiest buyer I have ever worked with did three things: checked the window tracks for dirt, looked inside the oven to see if it was clean, and opened the dishwasher to look at the outer framing of the door. If these areas were clean, she knew the rest of the house would be too.
Speaking of clean, it is absolutely the cheapest thing you can do to make your house show ready. No one, not one buyer out there, wants to buy someone else’s dirt. It just doesn’t happen. Pay attention to the bottom of cupboards, the baseboards, around the bottom of the toilet. Yep, everywhere.
You’ll need a place to store all of the stuff you are packing away. If you can, rent a storage unit or get one of those PODS that allow you to pack things and then have them stored off-site. If you can’t pay for storage, use your garage. I would rather have a staged home with a garage that is stacked wall-to-wall and top-to-bottom than an empty garage and a messy house.
There are a couple of good websites I found that will give you ideas and perhaps be helpful:
From the National Associaiton of Realtors, click here.
From US News and World Report, click here.
And to visit Barb Schwartz’s website, click here. Barb Schwartz is the queen of home staging. She has been teaching Realtors techniques of home staging since before I was a Realtor (over 22 years). I used to refer to staging a home as “Schwartzing” a home. That’s how ingrained in my head this lady is.
At the top of this article is a photo of my listing in Mt. Park. I want you to compare that photo to the one that you find to the right. Can you see the big improvement? The photo to the right is how this room used to look. This was not a home with a problem of clutter. This was a house that needed to show case the homes features. The home owner moved the living room furniture to the other end of the room in order to showcase the wonderful windows. Where a TV cabinet had blocked windows, now what you see is light and sunshine. In addition, the owner replaced several windows that had broken seals. Now when you walk in, you step back and feel the wow factor. That is what sells a house.
Along with my own open house at 4447 Golden Lane, there are a total 17 opens planned for Lake Oswego on May 24th. I’d love to have you come by to see me tomorrow. My listings is a 1616 square foot townhouse in Mt. Park. Recent updates include gorgeous granite counters in the kitchen, laminate flooring, and new windows. It has 2 large bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. Probably the nicest feature is that it has huge, south-facing windows that look out across trees and well-cared for landscaping. It is also an end unit. It’s priced at $255,000. I’ll be there from 2 to 5pm. You’ll find my signs at the corner of Melrose and Fosberg and from there you can easily follow them into the complex on Thundervista.
La Provence is the youngster in the group. The founders of the restaurant, Pascal, Didier, and Alain came from France in 1996 wanting to share their passion for the French Patisserie, which is a bakery that specializes in pastries and sweets. Don’t be fooled by the outstanding selection of breads, tortes, cakes and croissants that are showcased as you walk-in. This restaurant offers first class food well beyond the temptations of sweets. When the restaurant first opened it specialized in breakfast and lunch. My favorite breakfast choice has long been the smoked-salmon hash. Served over crispy hash browns, the smoked salmon is topped by a poached egg and creamy dill sauce. The homemade bread makes delicious toast, and the coffee is outstanding. For lunch I recommend the French onion soup. It is the best I have ever had. And in the last year or so the restaurant has begun to stay open for dinner service. I recently had a wonderful dinner there at a time when they were offering live music. I consider the pricing to be affordable and the food highly reliable. The atmosphere is relaxed and sunny with bright splashes of color from the art work and provencial-style table cloths. Located at 15964 Boones Ferry Rd, you can find menus and more information at their website,
Next door to La Provence is Gubanc’s. Gubanc’s and I have something in common. We both came to Lake Oswego in 1976. I guess you could say that we kind of grew up together. Owned by Tony and Anne Gubanc, this restaurant is a neighborhood classic. The atmosphere is classy while being comfortable. Not too expensive, you’ll find the food to be Northwest with an interesting flair. The restaurant is most famous for its soups. They have 80 different varieties that were personally created for their menu. While the traditionals like clam chowder are available, you will also often find unusual selections like Chicken and Pear or Santa Fe Chicken with White Bean. Yum. A great deal at lunch is the Soup Board. For $7.50 you get a generous bowl of homemade soup with a side board of bread, cheese, and fruit. Dinner options include South Western Pork Wraps, Chicken and Dumplings, and Halibut Provencial. For dessert they are well known for their Fresh Fruit Cobbler. You’ll find it busy every night of the week. There is a full bar and I think there are quite a few regulars who eat dinner here several nights a week. To continue to fill the dining room night-after-night for over 30 years, you know they must be doing something right. Located at 16008 Boones Ferry Rd. For a copy of the menu and more information, visit Gubanc’s website at 
Finally, I want to brag about Riccardo’s. This is my favorite “special occasion” restaurant in Lake Oswego. Not that you would only want to go there on special occasions, like an anniversary or a birthday. I have gone there with friends for a casual lunch or dinner many times. It’s just that I’ve also celebrated many birthdays and anniversaries there. In my mind, it is a special place that provides just the right atmosphere for a special night out. Opened in 1980 by Riccardo and Georgette Spaccarelli, it is very fine Italian dining at it’s best. The Spaccarellis are known for their annual trips to Italy where they visit wine producers and make selections to offer with their food. The entire meal is extremely authentic. It’s also mouth watering and complex. My favorite item on the menu is the Penna Strozzapreti. Penna pasta with a sauce of cremini mushrooms, black olives, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes in a light cream sauce that is then dusted with parmigiano reggiano. That is comfort food to me and a real taste treat. There are two dining rooms. The inside room seats 55 and is very nice. But my favorite, and where I always make it a point to dine, is the outside patio. It seats 75 and is surrounded by high walls that in the summer are topped with flowers. There are terra cotta tiled floors and several fountains. The perimeter tables do have a roof over them and in cooler weather they have numerous heaters to keep you warm. No, I don’t think you’d be able to dine out there in January. But for most of the year you can. It is not only comfortable, you will feel like you’ve gone to Italy. Riccardo’s is just across the street from Gubanc’s and La Provence at 16035 Boones Ferry Rd. You can find their menu and more information at their website,
There is such a panoply of amenities in Lake Oswego that Dianne and I have been talking about incorporating profiles of local favorites from time to time. I thought I’d begin with a very special person who I would be lost without… my local “dog-whisperer”, Valerie Pulley.
seems it has been the subject of pets, and dogs in particular. We all know what a Portuguese Water Dog is now, thanks to “Beau” at the White House. I know our own friend & blogging cohort, Ron Ares, wrote a post most recently about his own dog, Nyree (left), adopted by the Ares family to save her from becoming a casualty of foreclosure. I’ve seen pieces on local and national news about the amazing number of dogs that have been abandoned or taken to shelters as fallout from the current economy, and it is heartbreaking to consider.
Staffordshire Terrier, Fedore, is her pride & joy, I’ve been taking my crazy black Standard Schnauzer, Kato (right) , to Valerie for years, and she is the only one who can calm him down enough to let his toenails be clipped. Turns out others have noticed this talent as well, and dog owners from far and wide bring their “hard to handle” pets to Valerie for tender loving care. Valerie mentions that “Some dogs have been kicked out of every grooming salon in Portland for biting, scratching, and generally squirming and freaking out. They bring them to me because I am the only one they’ve found to be able to handle them.” I 
ask her why she thinks this is, and she says “I’m just not afraid of them, and I care about them.” She has been working in the Lake Oswego area for around 12 years now, spending some of her career at the Lake Oswego Dog Shoppe, and now is working for