As I show houses in Minneapolis I always am interested in how art work is displayed on the walls. The sellers might not even think about it, but those pictures and how they are arranged say a great deal. This is where a stager or someone who knows something about art work can help. I know enough to help my sellers and buyers.
I love guys and I will start with them. For some reason guys love to hang things high. You know it is a guy's place when you see the pictures hanging three feet down from the ceiling. I can't tell you why they do this, but they do. Maybe it has to do with their height and perspective of things. Guys also like to treat the wall like a dartboard. Whatever sticks will stay there!
Couples can go crazy collecting a mass of pictures of their life together. It becomes a time line of what has happened. It starts at one end of the room with their wedding picture and progresses along with the kids, their graduation pictures, more wedding pictures, and then the grandchildren. What happens is that buyers forget looking at the room and spend the time talking about how everyone has changed. They start creating a narrative about this family they have never met. This can be a problem when the pictures are hung on a hall. It makes the hall more narrow. The buyer is thinking how many nails they will have to remove, patch the wall, and then paint. The sellers never had that in mind. They just wanted to keep in their hearts and minds all the fun from their family vacation.
I always remind my sellers that religious and political art work needs to be taken down. The property needs to remain neutral. We all know the piece will be gone when the new owners arrive, but buyers sometimes cannot picture the room without that piece. It might not go with their way of thinking, so they take the house off their list.
Kids and pets are categories that need to be paid attention to. Buyers can be very sensitive about masses of photos of kids or a favorite pet. It can turn them off to a property. You might say, "Get serious!" It is true. What if a couple was having trouble getting pregnant? Seeing all those happy faces could break their hearts. There are some buyers who do not like pets. They don't want to know Fido ever lived in this house.
When the house is on the market, your art work and memoires are not hung to make you happy but to impress the buyers. I give several guide lines to my sellers:
*Black and white photographs are impressive and can be inexpensive. The frame can be very subtle
*Go big. The wow factor can make a wall come alive. It will be the only thing you need to hang on that wall.
*Mirror, mirror on the wall... it will offer good feng shui and will have the room show big.
*Unique collections can be interesting when selected carefully. Don't let the collection get too big or have it be expensive so you are fearful of something being broken or stolen.
Bare walls leave a room cold and the sound can bounce off the walls. I encourage sellers to hang things on the wall, but they need to work within certain guidelines. The way to test things is to have some friends over and watch their reaction. If they say it is attractive but get on with the evening, then things are okay. If they have to keep talking about it and look at it again and again, then something is not right. When I want feedback about a property, I want to hear about the room size and not a comment about the 6'x6' wedding picture in the living room.
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