To all the moms out there - Are you losing, or have already lost, the adult rooms in your house to the annexation of your kid’s rooms? I know this is a tough battle to wage. I two young children and go through this myself. You don't have to give up every room though! It is important and actually healthy to maintain a solid balance of adult living space and children living space in your home. Here is a quick story on how we helped one of our client's take back their living room.



The client's home has a nice living room space right off their foyer. As you can see in this before picture you could hardly tell it was a living room though. I can imagine what the SuperNanny would say about this scenario!








There were other spaces in the house for a kid's play room but over time the living room became yet another play area for children leaving the adults without a room of their own. The mom had enough though and called us in to help take it back.





One of her requests was to use these two pictures as inspiration for the colors of the room. They are family paintings of the area where she is from and she loves the colors.


Having something of value to you to share with an interior designer is a very important step to take early in the design process. This will ensure the designer brings ideas that mean the most to you and fit your styles.







With the inspiration of the pictures, an understanding of the desired feel for the room that we got from conversations with the clients, and some parameters of existing furniture, we created a variety of space plans to start looking at the options for the room before anything was purchased. Here are three examples.





The client liked the layout of the third design so with that we had a basis for what new pieces to add and how to use the existing pieces to achieve their desired goals.








Here are the after pictures of the room. The sofa and paint colors brought out the desired colors of the picture.










Notice the kid’s area is now on the raised part of their family room which is where the client wanted it, out of the way of the initial impression of visitors entering their home.



We also had a custom rot iron railing installed to replace the old wood one giving an updated and unique feel to the separation of the rooms.

Labels: Interior Design, living room

The home marketing and re-design seminar we held last Wednesday was a great night with a lot of information shared and great questions from the attendees. Everyone walked out with more knowledge about the Boulder housing market which I am happy to report is not as grim as you may think.

Price points at $400k and below are the hot properties in the Boulder area. Houses between $600k and $1 million are a harder sale although Carrie Nash with WR Starkey said she has seen more jumbo loans come through in the past week. This is a good sign. Caryn Geiger of Coldwell Banker Residential says she has seen some investors re-entering the market at the lower priced properties. This is also a good sign.

With low inventory, the real estate market is like a beauty contest. The properties that are listed are pristine. Trying to compete against them without taking steps to make your house as equally beautiful and better yet more beautiful is a big mistake.

Home staging is a smart step to increase the chances of selling your home. There are great local companies in the Boulder area offering professional home staging services that will make your home shine. Most home staging companies like ours offer a range of staging services from guiding you on how to arrange your own furniture, to supplementing your furniture with outside inventory to fill in gaps and update styles, to completely staging vacant homes. Design Matters Home also offers other services that will give you peace of mind that your house remains in top condition if you have to move away from it while it is on the market.

If you choose not to hire a professional, CLEAN and DE-CLUTTER. These two things give the property a larger ROI (return on investment) than anything else. You would think this these two steps would be no-brainers to people selling their home. Unfortunately we and real estate agents we work with continually see people not taking the marketing of their home seriously. This is an expensive mistake. In addition to cleaning and de-cluttering your home do what you can to repair and update as much as possible. I know it is not always practical to update and repair everything so work with your real estate agent to determine the best focus areas for your home.

PLEASE don’t reduce the price, especially if it is what is known as a chicken price reduction (a gratuitous price reduction that is basically meaningless), before a t least talking with a staging professional. ROI on staging is over 100%. Your first price reduction will most certainly cost you a higher amount than the costs of staging. Once you take the step to reduce the price there is no ROI as you will not get that money back.

This workshop was part of our monthly workshop series. We are working on a workshop about outdoor kitchens next. Check back on our website for updates. Re-caps of our past workshops along with other articles written by us, including another recent article on home staging and more of our thoughts on home marketing, can be found in the Design MattersHome Blog. You can also always send any questions to me at helly@designmattershome.com. If you are into Twitter you can follow me, and ask me questions there as well – http://www.twitter.com/askhelly.

Labels: Boulder Colorado, Home Staging, real estate