If your home for sale is located in a growing suburb or bedroom community with good schools, recreational opportunities, and lots of parks and playgrounds, it is very likely that a majority of your potential home buyers would be parents looking for a great home for their growing family to reside in. Knowing this, staging kids’ bedrooms should be done with the proper amount of planning and careful thought.
Just like any other area of the home, staging a child’s bedroom is not about showing your own taste, preferences, or personality, much less your kids’. It is about selling the space and making it complement the overall marketability of the home. The purpose of staging the children’s bedroom is to sell the space by allowing the buyers to see their children in that space, so the bedroom should be as neutral and broadly-appealing in design.
Some tips for staging a kid’s bedroom:
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Start with what you already have. Limited budget? No worries, because you can probably start the bedroom staging effort by using accessories and fixtures you already have. Look at the walls and ceiling; what colors are used? If it’s green, blue, or pink, then you already have a color scheme to start with. A fresh coat of paint on the walls, a newly-cleaned area rug, and toys or furniture items from the garage or storage would spruce up the space without much cost.
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Gender-neutral bedrooms are usually recommended. Try to decorate the bedroom as unisex as possible; one room may have more shades of one color than another, but try to downplay themes, cartoon characters, sports accessories, or other items and designs that are more identified with one gender. This makes it easier for potential buyers to imagine their children in the rooms.
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Remove all personal identifiers without exception. Your kids’ photos, certificates, sports jerseys, school accessories, even clothing items with their names on it should be removed from the room and kept stored away or off-site. Aside from the staging rule of depersonalizing the home, you would not want to expose your kids’ identities to harmful people as well, so do not leave anything that would reveal their names or ages to clients.
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Keep it bright and cheery with natural light. Choose window dressings and treatments that let in as much natural light as possible,. If the room has a great outside view, you would want to highlight that as well. The brighter the kid’s bedroom is, the more appealing it will look. If the room doesn’t have windows, make it look brighter with bright-colored paint, and turn up the artificial lighting (lamps, overhead lights).
