After about 10 years or so, we're getting out of the staging business.
From a pure time management standpoint, we probably never should have been doing it at all. But Mary has training and a great eye, she enjoyed it, and it was an attractive free service to offer to our sellers. Over the years, we had managed to amass quite an inventory of furniture and accessories, mostly picked up from downsizing clients. Our basement (fortunately, a walk-out) looked like a furniture store.
Now, Mary is just tired of it. Finding reliable helpers with a truck to move furniture in and out has always been hit or miss, and for the last couple of years, with our very hot seller's market, it really hasn't been worth the effort - we could fill a home with corn cobs and it would probably still sell for 10% over asking with no contingencies.
So since about March, Mary has been working on getting rid of everything, finding homes for it with clients or taking it to Goodwill. And now, we're officially done and our basement is back. It's strange down there now. It's soooo big and open and full of possibilities. Solve one problem and another pops up - what are we going to do with that space?
6 sofas - gone- 12 big chairs - gone
- 7 dining room tables and chairs - gone
- 4 inflatable queen-size mattresses - gone
- 3 kitchen tables - gone
- 6 coffee tables - gone
- More lamps, rugs, side tables, posters and prints than you can shake a stick at - gone
- 5 floor to ceiling bookcases full of accessories - gone
One of the things we noticed during the years that Mary was staging was that a fairly significant amount of our accessories and artwork was disappearing, stolen at some point during the listing period. It was annoying but not worth getting our undies in a bunch over. But yesterday, as we cleaned out the last listing, we encountered the topper: someone had eaten the box of biscotti that had been a kitchen decoration regular since we started staging. I have no idea what the shelf life of biscotti is, but I hope that box was full of dead weevils and disgusting bacteria and that someone got a bad stomach ache.
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