Effective Staging Steps to Sell A Home Fast

We’d be a dream team, my spiritual twin, Sandra, and I, staging homes for sale. Odd that for the 30 years we’ve been pals, Sandra’s family has yet to move from her home by a creek, while my family has moved five times. I confess we met at our rented house, but with Sandra’s aid our family successfully sold three houses we mortgaged. She was my go-to consult for decorating various domiciles.

Decades ago she feathered and color washed our chair railed dining room. As I was about to exit for a meeting, Sandra arrived with supplies and a large board. I asked about the board. She replied, “I need to practice feathering before I start.”

I almost cancelled her first paid decor job. I thought of Dining Room Owner Two, my beloved hubby, who learned from his dad how to paint walls with nary a streak or drip. MBH ever ferrets faults in painted walls. But Sandra’s technique efforts wowed both he and I. So I snapped wall photos for her portfolio, as I deemed myself her unofficial, unpaid manager.

Sandra’s hands needed to beautify whatever she surveyed in a room. Of course she politely asked before she shoved someone’s couch or end table across the room. Watching her, I learned that well placed items could bless others. For me it would bless buyers to rapidly place offers on my former homes, ... houses, by the way, not in bidding-wars California.

This past week I helped Sandra’s daughter, M, stage her Deep South house for sale...


Clever sellers clean their homes into open canvases on which eager buyers can imagine their belongings. Clever M’s house had a great room busy to the ceiling with three artsy young kids, two hairy dogs, and one hubby with his military glue and paint models. What she did before she left the house to the Coldwell Banker realtor, any seller should consider as effective staging steps:

* Clear walls and ceilings of family items. Sticky toys will cling to vaulted ceilings.

* Caulk and clean and paint the cleared walls, as well as damaged baseboards and doors. She used a contractor recommended painter to paint the walls the new neutral, light gray.

* Hide in the boxes.  Box books, eclectic home decor, kitchenware, and excess toys. M orderly stacked boxes in the garage, so buyers could survey the car space. Rental storage units are useful.

* Erase your furniture. M and her husband already trucked their furnishings to storage near her husband’s relocation. Then M, the kids, and dogs returned to campout in the house.

* Beg, borrow, stage. Among my donations, M borrowed a queen air mattress, bedding, a wood/leather card table with chairs. M scrounged through my décor for floral arrangements, a modern vase, and a resin Celtic cross. On the fireplace mantle she placed my Hobby Lobby wired art that spelled B-L-E-S-S-I-N-G-S. Just a few, well placed items can pop a house for sale into a buyer's home.

Effective stagings could spell blessings to home sellers and buyers. Yet even more blessings are freely enjoyed by sellers or buyers or anyone who lives by faith with God in Jesus. In His house you'll find connected family and a home that's out of this world.

Heart in San Francisco, Part 2

 When I Came Home to You
"I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever. . . "

The morning after I posted the first “Heart in San Francisco” blog, God hugged my aural sense with that very song. Hearing Tony Bennett’s hit over the AM waves, its slip of poetic lyrics pulled me back to ‘63, when our family first moved to the City by the Bay.

Pacific Sunset, Half Moon Bay

From Chi town my family relocated, via a train ride across the plains, over the rugged Rockies, and Sierra Nevada. I recall seeing the latter mountainsides from the window. I recall the kindness of a caring Negro Porter. I recall my mom struggling with a wailing child. Anyone else would have reveled a train adventure. Not I.

Though trains chugged on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge our railway journey ended in Oakland Station. As Daddy was already at work, my never-will-drive mommy said her uncle drove us into the City that February. Our first home was a hotel on the outskirts of Chinatown. With mom pregnant, we leaned to traipse the steep streets to the best oriental restaurants and bakeries. In out of the way alleys Daddy took us to rooms many Chinese residents crowded with the best chefs of that time. Our family taste buds loved that black bean Cantonese cuisine.

May of ‘63 we settled into our new brick and wood ranch, the front steps yet to be cemented. Like Bennett sang, it stood “high on a hill,” bedrock west of the Airport. The closest meat market was in the Mexican Mission District. Mommy carried energetic crabs from Fisherman’s Wharf, steamed buns and food delights from Chinatown. We had one supermarket by the coast. No hints of shopping malls back then.

San Francisco Bay beckoned hearts by the millions. Condos, subdivisions, businesses, and streets spread like kudzu through the Bay Area. Sometimes Daddy drove us to model homes, hoping to move us closer to his work in South Bay. But Mommy wouldn’t budge. Besides she worked as a nurse nearby. Meanwhile, the ranch filled with six giggling, pinching ‘gals’ as Daddy called we siblings.

Now five decades later, Daddy home in heaven, the gals moved out, Mommy remains at that house, family pictures hugging the walls.

Until 2009 Mommy walked five-mile jaunts daily with heavy shopping bags. “I’m a little slow now, Cindy,” she confessed.  Wide eyed I watched my eighty-six years young mom cardio glide, pump light dumbbells, and squeeze abs on an exercise ball.

MBH and I enjoyed our extra days with Mom. Time let calmer heads prevail to insure her leaky house would be fixed and snugly her home. Our final evening we drove Mom over the hill to the coast to celebrate our wedding anniversary.  Blessed with hugs of a sunset, sourdough bread, clam chowder and Dungeness crabs, wouldn’t God top it off with this song over the radio? Here’s a version my Hawaiian-born Dad would love.           Enjoy.

Affirmation in Hand, Finale

So what have these fuzzy eyes pondered these past three weeks of blog silence, silence so cavernous you can hear the coyote howl echo?

Well these fuzzy eyes pondered a job that fit My Beloved Hubby to a tee. Every phrase of the job description sketched MBH down to the munificent gray hairs of his experience. Which is why the recruiter called him. And called him. And had a fellow engineer contact him as well. The position would send us back to a spot we just vacationed at Labor Day week. Up there we galloped our blazing red, rented Dodge Charger from family to friends.

It was my niche of shopping zones, green pastures, wavy cornfields, tasty potlucks, and hug gatherings. Oh to be resettled nearer to the God space that restored our souls for four years! But this location, our sweet location, this perfect locale offered a new job with no guarantee of work beyond its given contracted time.

Excuse me. My Maria just handed me a wad of white tissues.  If we had not sold our perfect location home, if he had still been jobless there, if this Deep South climate were not so sunny in January and February and March, April, May, . . . And if only tandem riders Dad and Bud had NOT found streets to ride along and sing TV theme songs to, then maybe, maybe, I’d be staging a Deep South home for sale right now.

“Maybe” is just a nonsense wish. The affirmation at hand was clear that day over two years ago when MBH received the Fed Ex contract and benefits packet. At the start of the nation’s dip into recession, we actually sold our house. The company paid to relocate us Deep South. We moved into a home that fits our family's needs. Like cattle on a thousand hills, in each action God provided us golden grace.

Two years later on this second Fall day-- though the recession is not over -- MBH continues to have a ton of analysis work. He’s busy at his charitable niches in church and the local community. And busy, of late, are the rest of the family here.

Here we will stay. Cotton fields puff snow white under vast blue skies. Pecan and long needled pine groves shelter us from the sun that now hurries to the horizon. Shorter days mean shorter evening rides. But if Dad gets home early, I know what streets he and Bud will ride, their black helmets slung on their heads like cowboy felt . . . streets named Cartwright, Bonanza, and Little Joe.

¿A adónde usted va?

1. A Mi Casa

Tropical Storm Ida drenches the Deep South this day. We pray they do not flood our state. We thank God the storm waters rivulet away, down streams to fill reservoirs of lakes that overflow into deep channel rivers which return the freshened waters home to the vast saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.

My beloved husband just returned home from an AFB by the Gulf of Mexico, the first of four work trips before Christmas. I have two bilingual pals just home from overseas trips. But this first blog of this multipart series begins with another trip home. My mom's.

My pretty, multi-lingual mom has a vast library of travelogues, after all, she's had over eight decades of active walking and touring the world. A Filipina nurse in the Japanese occupation my mother also survived a choppy, double oceanic voyage to New Jersey to further her education and help fill America's nursing shortage. My mother moved to study in the Midwest where she met her husband and birthed three of six girls. Four decades ago, she endured her eldest girl's whining on the train to the coast, to the city she'd build a house that is still home today.

Mommy never learned to drive a car, even after Daddy went home to heaven. Family helped her get around town. She loves to ride the bus and take five-mile walks. Until 2008 you could find her weekdays carting bag loads home with a whistle to scare would be thieves. Her bus stops were only a block up or down from our hilltop street.

It was too easy for her to attend Sunday mass, the bus stop maybe a hundred feet from the church doors. This past Sunday would not be different except for that wide elastic wrap she wound around her knee. "My leg felt funny when I got up," she told me on the phone.

On the way out from church that funny leg wanted to collapse. At first Mommy did what she did to her whining child. She scolded it to behave. Then she did what she always does for her kids. She prayed.

"Lord, please help me get home," she pled that morning.

It doesn't take a crisis for my mom to turn to Notre Padre, Deo Sanctus. Her life experiences (even hard ones), her prayerful healthy habits, her Sunday devotion to hear universal truth, receive forgiveness, and to worship, God uses to bless and model how I can fully walk through life day by day.

By faith I will get to my final home as my mom did to her temporal home Sunday. My legs may give out on me, still Unfailing Jesus Love will get me there. Hallelujah!