Staging your home is a proven strategy for speeding up the sales process. It can even help boost your home’s value when offers start coming in. By highlighting your home’s strengths and giving prospective buyers a sense of how they’d utilize different spaces, you can help these prospects develop emotional attachments to your home. Here are some quick tips for helping you along with the staging process:

Pay attention to lighting

Great lighting is crucial for making your home look warm and welcoming. If you notice that some areas of your home are dark and dreary, increase the wattages of the lightbulbs in the fixtures and lamps. A good rule of thumb is to have a total of 100 watts of lighting for every 50 square feet of interior space. Also, you should strive for three different types of lighting per room: accent lighting (on a wall or table), task lighting (such as a reading or under-cabinet light), and ambient lighting (overhead).

Update your appliances

Alright, so you might not be willing to spend thousands of dollars on installing new, stainless steel appliances just for staging. However, studies show that new appliances in the kitchen garner high returns for sellers, which means you stand to get a better price for you home. A great, inexpensive solution is to apply stainless steel stick-on coverings to all of your appliances. These coverings can quickly transform an outdated kitchen into one that screams ultra-modern.

Get rid of unnecessary furniture

It should go without saying that when staging a home, you need to get rid of clutter. However, sellers often forget about some of the biggest causes of clutter: namely, couches, chairs, and tables. Having too much furniture in your home can make it seem small and cramped. So before you start showing your home, take a walk around and remove furniture items that you can live without. You don’t need to get rid of everything (afterall, you want the space to look lived-in), but you want to make sure you’re maximizing available space.