5 Tips For Getting The Kitchen Ready For Open House
Kitchen
the heart of a home
The kitchen is the heart of the home. It's where families gather to prepare food, share meals, and have meaningful conversations. When buyers check out an open house, they spend a significant amount of time inspecting the kitchen for functionality, comfort, and the potential for social connection.
If your home is on the real estate market, it's important to give your kitchen a little extra TLC to attract buyers' attention. But effectively staging an occupied home for open house requires more than just tidying up. To significantly increase your chances of a quick and profitable home sale, start with our top five tips for how to stage your kitchen so buyers want to spend their lives in it.
Clean, clean, clean
The first step to staging any room is to make it sparkle from top to bottom, but this is especially true of the kitchen. Food stains, grease spatters, and stray crumbs can often hide in plain sight. If possible, hire a professional cleaning crew who can come in and scrub every surface and crevice until they're gleaming. Also, don't forget about offensive smells; make sure your fridge and dishwasher are deodorized, and sanitize your garbage disposal. Shiny appliances help position fresh and new kitchens.
2. Kitchen staging: Depersonalize
When people come to an open house, they need to be able to envision themselves living in your home. That's hard to do if you've got your children's artwork hanging on the fridge and an assortment of gadgets cluttering up your countertops. Make a clean sweep of all your surfaces and remove your personal items.
3. Kitchen staging: Organize your cabinets
Adequate storage is a crucial element of any kitchen, so it's only natural for buyers to poke around inside your cabinets and drawers. If your cupboards are messy or crammed to the gills, it will give the impression that your kitchen is lacking in space. Take the time to organize the insides of your cabinets and clean out your drawers; if necessary, pack some of your extra crockery or dishes away to create a feeling of spaciousness. This is particularly important if you have open shelving or glass-front doors.
4. Kitchen staging: Make small upgrades
The average American kitchen renovation costs upwards of $20,000, but there are some simple, inexpensive ways to freshen up the look of your kitchen without blowing through your budget. Invest in new cabinet hardware, replace the faucet, or update old light fixtures. A new coat of paint is also an affordable way to revitalize any room just make sure you choose a neutral color with cool undertones. According to Remodel Magazine, Kitchen remodels are likely to recoup better ROI at home sale than upgrades such as roof, siding or landscaping.
5. Kitchen staging: Accessorize
While decluttering is important, you don't want your kitchen to be completely empty, either. Bare countertops and walls can seem sterile; instead, use appropriate accessories to make your kitchen appear warm, lived-in, and inviting. Hang new towels on the racks and clean curtains on the windows. Bowls of fresh fruit, a pop of color here and there, fresh flowers on a kitchen table all help warm up a kitchen. And don't forget plants, which bring much needed color and vibrancy to any room in the house.