DIY Staging - Dining Room Pictures & Vignettes

DIY Staging - Dining Rooms

Dining room home staging techniques are tricky. For maximum buyer appeal, the dining room should NOT look used. Specifically, no place settings, no family photos, no fine china.

Instead, the dining room should evoke the romance of entertaining in a Pottery Barn - neutral - non personal way. Easier said than done. That is why we give you before and after pictures of dining rooms transformed through home staging.

As an aside, you may notice that each of the first 3 dining rooms was "Staged" using red slip covers. These are excellent for most houses to add visual and textual warmth.

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Dining Room 1

Too Bare	Warm and Inviting

As you can see from the before photograph, Dining Room 1 is bare, cold and uninviting. As staged, transformation is dramatic. First, we added fabric. Slip covers to the chairs - to fill out the slip covers, you can add an inexpensive bed pillow and pillow case sliped over the back rest of each chair. This is an easy yet advanced staging technique that adds a lot!

We also added a simple window treatement. Okay, we'll fess up. The window treatment is actually a duvet cover. Instead of covering a comforter in the bedroom, here we improvised using the home owners existing fabric. The new buyer loved this window treatment so much, she did not mind that it was not a "real" window treatment and wrote it into the contract anyway!

Please note: we did not paint this dining room! The lamp added to the dresser (transformed into a small buffet table) along with the fabrics add warmth to the room and in the photograph and appear to warm up the paint color - all without re painting.

Note the greenery strategically placed. This "softens the edges" of the dining room in a helpfully neutral way.

The buffet table to the left of the after picture is actually a small dresser borrowed from the owners' guest bedroom. By draping 1.5 yards of fabric, folded in a triangle shape, along with a wire bowl from Target, a tall lamp and neutral artwork, we finished off the dining room "vignette" simply yet dramatically.

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Dining Room 2

Too Casual	Fabulous & More Formal

Based on this before photograph, Dining Room 2 is far too casual. The furniture reflects a breakfast nook rather than formal dining room.

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Dining Room 3

Dog Bed in Dining Room?	Just Right

A comment about Purpose. Each room has a traditional purpose, and for selling, must return to its traditional purpose. Here, the dining room featured a dog bed with a less prominent piano along with faux painting. The Staging Solution? First, fresh paint. Second, a simple table (here, the owner's breakfast table) to simulate a dining room table. Note the slip covers on the chairs add warmth.

Third - a fan in the dining room? The fixture must reflect the room's purpose and as a result, we replaced the fan with an inexpensive chandelier from a big box home improvement store.

Finally, greenery in the corner and a rich (and generic) piece of artwork finish off the dramatic transformation! With these simple changes, this dining room went from what? to wow!

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