Flat Fee MLS Blog

Home Sellers need to carefully plan how to enjoy Thanksgiving, while making their property attractive to buyers.   Keep in mind that while you may have fewer showings during the Thanksgiving season, the people that are actively shopping for a home during the holidays are the most serious buyer’s.  You certainly want them to remember your home, not your blowup, gobbling lawn turkey.

Consider our tips for decorating and enjoying the season, without overwhelming prospective home shoppers.

Tips for Staging at Thanksgiving

• When decorating your entrance, think simple.  Add a pumpkin, gourds or a few strands of lights, but this is not the time you want to bring out the full display.  Keep the decor seasonal, but allow the character of your house to come through.

• Update worn out holiday accessories.   Accessorize at Thanksgiving with throw pillows, candles, tablecloths and place settings that bring peaceful, fall colors indoors.

• Use natural items to decorate your home.  Pumpkins, gourds, flowers and fruit make an attractive centerpiece, as long as they are not overdone.   Try to avoid plastic, sparkling or childish appearing decorations.  

• Never hide important architectural details, that may be a selling point to your buyer, behind contruction paper turkeys.

• Instead of entertaining at your house this year, consider going to the home of a friend or relative.  Restaurants also provide a great dining experience without the mess of cooking at home.

• If you do your Christmas shopping early, keep wrapped gifts neatly stacked in one closet or provide a special place to store them that is out of sight.

• Light a fire in your fireplace, or stage it to look good, even if it isn’t burning.  Try adding decorative logs or pillar candles to an unused fireplace.

• Although clutter busting is always extremely important when marketing a home, holiday decorations make anti-clutter a greater battle to overcome.   This year may be a good time to skip decorations, entirely.

It is possible to enjoy the holidays and successfully show your home.  Just remember that less is more, and if you add seasonal touches, do it sparingly.  

Thank you for visiting Why6percent.com, your flat fee MLS listing company.  Happy Thanksgiving!!

 Houseplants can help remove certain harmful volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) from indoor air. Things nobody wants around their lungs or their kids.

According to NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) in the late 1980’s they conducted a study of 19 houseplants and found that the plants had potential for capturing harmful gases. The study was an attempt to find ways to purify air for extended stays in orbiting space stations.

Many of these plants are adapted to tropical climates and grow under dense canopies and low-light conditions. They have to be superefficient in capturing light as well as in processing the gases necessary for photosynthesis. Because of these traits, they have greater potential for purifying the air in your home by capturing the harmful gases.

The next time you visit a local nursery, pick up a few of these common houseplants: palms, ferns, corn plant, dracaena, rubber plant, weeping ficus, english ivy, peace lily, dieffenbachia (dumb cane), schefflera, orchid, philodendron, pothos, dwarf banana and Chinese evergreen. Florist mums and gerber daisy will also do the job for you. What they learned in outer space can be applied to your inner space as well.

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              If you like to collect old stuff, such as salvage yard finds, you  might want to use your imagination and use recycled materials to build a unique, creative custom patio to replace a boring square brick patio. Landscape designer Diane Bloom devised a plan for a curved patio using some recycled materials.

A professional would charge about $6,000. to design and install a recycled patio, but a do-it-yourselfer can design their own patio and install it for about $700, assuming that they already have some recyclable materials on hand. The project can be completed in three weekends, with the help of friends for the concrete work.

Bloom designed a patio that reused some of the existing bricks, incorporated several wrought-iron treasures, and added colorful Three Rivers and Arizona flagstones and river rocks for an electic mix of materials, colors and textures. She curved the patio boundary to soften the landscape and grouped the wrought-iron artifacts for balance and visual impact.

Here are the steps to completion:

1. Preparing the site

2. Building the concrete form

3.Pouring the concrete

4. Placing the recycled objects

Bloom rates this project a 3 on a difficulty scale of 1(easy) to 5 (difficult).

Check out www.hgtv.com to view a video on Landscape Smart: Episode LDS-506

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   Why not reupholster your old and worn furniture instead of tossing it out? Bring new life to your style and cut down on waste and further resource use.

Many antiques dealers would kill to get their hands on the bones of much of the furniture that is thrown away or even burned as firewood. Between 1960 and 2001, discarded furniture and furnishings ballooned from 2.2 million tons a year to 8.1 million tons, reports the EPA. Furniture is bulky stuff that takes up a lot of landfill space.

Extend the life of your furniture and save money by getting it reupholstered. Be crafty and do the job yourself or support local artisans who specialize in the time-honored trade. You have an  unlimited range of colors, textures and styles. Style is really limitless, from ancient aesthetic to uber-modern. 

Get the freshest look to match your changing decor tastes without contributing to the removal of more trees or the mining of more metals. Every day can be Earth Day, when you think about it.

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