04 Feb Dressing Up the Garage
Guest Blogger – Wade Gilley, Realtor
Dressing Up the Garage
Often our out buildings and garages end up as final resting places for household castoffs and holiday decorations, amid sports equipment, bikes, yard tools and the occasional recycling bin. All that extra stuff can hide a real asset. The garage is a hidden gem when it comes to staging property for a sale. It is real space that can be a big enticement to buyers, if it’s visible and inviting.
This is a weekend prep project to accomplish before the property is listed. It pays dividends from a sales point of view and the bottom line.
Step one. Start by taking a garage inventory with a four category tactic: keep, toss, donate, and maybe. A critical eye will immediately downsize the contents and clear out the unwanted extras, and the garage is ready to be transformed. Use the yard or driveway as temporary “work space” and hope for good weather. This is step one. Then haul away the unwanted and the donations.
Step two. When everything is out of that space, give it a good sweep, hose down the flooring, and wipe shelves and surfaces. Wash the garage window. Replace burned out ceiling bulbs and consider painting the entry door to the house. Are you surprised how big the space looks now?
Step three is decision time. Time to put away your keeps and maybes, or decide to really transform the space. There are several great products available which can transform floor surfaces from tired and stained to super clean and fresh. Some even come with sparkles! Special cleaners and paint products begin around $30 a gallon and the result is a strong epoxy shield which really renovates the space. It is easy to apply and the results are stunning. Even the unpainted shelving, bins of sports equipment, garden tools and storage boxes will look better with a new floor, and I guarantee that everyone will notice the difference!
Now it is up to you what you bring back into that transformed space.
Notes for Lend A Box: What a great strategy, Wade! When you are looking at your empty garage, before you put all your keeps and maybes back inside, consider renting our easy to use, stack-able, un-crushable plastic boxes during your staging process to store your garage items until you move. If you pack all your stuff into boxes, the garage will be tidy and neat, and appear to be much larger – showing off all the hard work you did to clean it up. Our boxes stack nicely on top of each other, and can hold 100 lbs on the lids. The boxes can easily be moved from place to place using the custom dollies that come with the orders.
And, as an added bonus, you have just created the perfect place to neatly store items from your home too! When you are staging, many Realtors and Professional Organizers recommend that you remove as much of your items as possible before you start showing your home. If you have things neatly stacked in the garage, your items are accessible to you, already packed for the upcoming move and out of the way visually for the home sale.
We offer short-term and long-term rental pricing for our boxes. And if you really love them, we are happy to sell them to you also. Please call for pricing, we’d love to help you with your upcoming home sale and move.
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