Whether you’re a homeowner, house flipper, or a real estate agent you’ve probably toured several homes on the market. Surely some of them looked well-cared for and up to date. Some may feature new fixtures and counter surfaces…and while all that’s enticing on the surface, the charm fades quickly once you walk into that room with the tired, old worn carpeting with the rust stain, or pet stain, or that was faded around where a bed, sofa, bookcase, or a dresser once sat. On the flipside, when you’re selling a home, odds are you don’t want to expend an exorbitant amount of money on improvements. The good news is that laying down fresh new carpeting isn’t as costly as installing hardwood flooring or other surfaces and staging a home with the right carpet may help to sell your home much quicker.
At New York Carpets & Flooring, we’ve got some great ideas on the kind of carpet perfect for staging your home and helping it move fast.
All the Home’s a Stage
Even William Shakespeare would agree with that sentiment. There is a bit of theatricality in staging your home for sale. It is, after all, where our families live, love, eat, celebrate, play, sleep and grow old. Thus, when staging a home for sale, the goal is to trigger the imagination of prospective buyers on how wonderful it would be to call your home theirs.
Prospective buyers don’t want to be distracted by how YOU live in the home. The minute they step into the entryway, they’ll be trying to imagine how THEY will live in it. That’s why a thorough house cleaning, the elimination of clutter, collectables, bric-a-brac and other distracting elements is one of the first tasks in staging. Painting walls, cleaning windows and refreshing landscaping around the home are also important. If you’re no longer living in the home, then removing worn furniture and staging the home with new sofas and chairs will also help tremendously. But don’t forget to replace that old carpet if you really want your home to sell. It’s often true that a patch-faded, worn or stained carpet will quickly take down your asking price and may result in the home sitting on the market for longer than is necessary.
Why Carpet is a Great Option
Certainly, hardwood flooring is quite popular, but if you’re still living in the home, installing hardwood can be a more intrusive process than installing carpet. Replacing carpet can be done incredibly quickly and the results can be just as impressive and even more warm and inviting when paired with the right furnishings.
Carpet is also less costly than hardwood and other flooring surfaces. Given some of the other expenses you’ll need to plan for to get your home ready to stage – plumbing, new water heater, wall repair, roof repair, fresh landscaping, new fixtures… the list goes on and on – saving money where you can is important and new carpeting helps you do that.
Finally, carpet can help mask imperfections and uneven architectural or surface anomalies in a room much better than hard surface flooring. For example, if the line of a hardwood plank is angled or doesn’t align properly with the angle of a wall, carpet can help soften the oddity.
But Which Type of Carpet?
When installing carpet as part of a staging effort, it’s important to aim for an aesthetic that is adaptable to a variety of style and decor preferences. It’s best to avoid dark or very strong colors which may create a negative reaction from prospective home buyers that have particular color preferences. Darker colored carpet also tends to make rooms look smaller than they actually are, so choosing a light shade of carpet is always a smarter option. A lighter, more neutral-colored, low-pile, cut loop carpet also gives you or your home stager a great deal of flexibility in the type of furnishings and other accents to present in the room, whether a living room, family room or any of the bedrooms.
One classic example is our DreamWeaver Scramble in an Ivory color, which is also one of our top selling carpets.
Another very popular option, which features a less pronounced pattern, is our DreamWeaver Kona color Linen.
New York Carpets & Flooring has hundreds of carpet styles, colors and options that are ideal for any home staging project. We also keep a wide selection of carpet in-stock, which can be installed within 72 hours. Browse through our in-stock carpet gallery online to find our best deals or visit our beautiful showroom in Anaheim.
1225 South State College Blvd.
Anaheim, CA 92806
(714) 778-3585