Cheap staging tips

As we are getting ready to put our house on the market, I thought I would share a couple inexpensive (or free!) ideas on staging that I used in my home:

Tip 1: Build around it!
Who says you have to have an exact idea of how you are going to stage an area of your home? Browse around, see what catches your eye, or, more importantly, what is on sale, and build on that! For example, I knew I wanted to stage our dinning room table, and I found these cute table mats for $1 a piece. I then picked out the dishes,centerpiece, and window curtain from there.

Tip 2: Don't purchase new wall accessories. Add art to the frames you already own!
If you are anything like me, you love to decorate your home with framed pictures of your children and family. Since staging rule #1 when you're selling your home is to "de-personalize" your home, you might feel that you need to take down all of your photos and buy all new wall accessories. To save $, use the frames that you already own and add your own art to it. This can be anything from photos of landscapes, flowers, the ocean, pretty much anything! I used these three frames which contained family photos, and for under $3 per 8 x 10 photo, I printed off some black and white pictures that I had taken of the Tetons.
Don't have fancy landscape photos for your frames? Try using old scrapbook paper! I am not much of a scrapbooker these days and my supply is pretty shabby, but I found some paper that matched my wall color, so even though the paper design isn't my favorite, I didn't have to spend any money so I went with it!

Happy staging!