One of the greatest challenges of optimizing your real estate dollars is in making your house look like a really beautiful property. It gets especially difficult if you are competing with new homes in your market.
There are a few skills you can develop in order to give your home the great custom look very expensive homes have for pennies on the dollar. Great drapes may be one sewing class away. Or you could get a good electric staple gun and start reupholstering some classic old furniture you find at a garage sale. Wallpaper could give your Victorian house an authentically decorated ceiling. Great trim work could take your track house from boring to wonderful. Your Italian villa might come from a paint can and a landscaping store. Got a window seat? Make a cushion for it!
All these things and more are possible and doable.
Any of these things are really expensive if you hire someone to do them, but they are not as difficult as you might think.
Most drapery making is sewing a lot of straight seams and far easier than sewing clothing. The drawback of ready-made curtains is that they are usually skimpy and unlined. They could never look as good as custom-made window treatments look. The really great ones have a fashion fabric, a flannel inner lining and another lining on the back…three layers of luxury.
You can get by nicely with upholstered top treatments and 36 to 54 inch wide side panels gathered on a rod. Anything narrower looks cheap. The taller your windows are, the fuller the panels need to be to look really good.
Your window treatments also need to hang from the crown molding to the floor and leave the glass completely exposed when open. Therefore your top treatment needs to be as wide as the glass and the side panels and reach from your crown molding (at the ceiling) to the glass at the top of your window. This is especially important if you have very high ceilings. You need these types of window treatments in rooms that need privacy and elegance like living rooms, some family rooms and master bedrooms.
Skip the fabric wrapped around a curtain rod. It looks pitiful compared to real window treatments. A decent sewing machine can do the job and you might find one second hand.
That sewing machine can come in handy for upholstering furniture, too. You can cut a pattern for upholstering a piece of furniture out of the old cover. You just need to get enough material and some new padding. New upholstery for your dining chairs or some you find second hand are just a staple gun away after you get the material of your choice. Best of all it can be just your style. Want an upholstered headboard? Take a class…or just try and see if you can do it. It's not that hard.
How's your bathroom? Is it moldy and smelly or beautifully tiled with perfectly clean grout? Building supply stores offer classes in tiling. Your baths can have custom-made shower curtains, too.
Then there's your furniture. Why does your furniture matter when you are selling the house, not the furniture?
Potential buyers ALWAYS notice and comment on your furniture, your clutter and…worst of all…your DIRT. So clean up and make it look great! You can take a class for that, too!
Beds can look like luxuriously draped four posters, lamp-shades can be recovered, doors and arch ways can be draped, media rooms can be upholstered for sound quality, and fabric can enhance any style.
A combo of beams, trim, paint and/or wallpaper can make a ceiling a special feature and cost less than you think.
Then there are walls (exterior and interior), rock, stucco and endless other possibilities for a good DIY person with lots of imagination. Maximize your real estate investment with creativity. Get a great looking property without paying big money for it. Keep it elegant and avoid badly overdone craft project looks.
Painting is a good skill most people can do with practice and preparation. Go for contrasting colors on walls and trim both inside and out, but keep it basic. Over done trendy paint treatments turn off many buyers. Elegantly neutral is key for resale.
Learn some new things and give potential buyers what they REALLY want, a house that fulfills their dreams and your pockets.
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