Homeowners today are putting so much more emphasis on having a useful, serene, and relaxing space. It’s no longer just an afterthought; it has become like an extension of every home. You can have that much-needed break from your day-to-day routine inside the house by enjoying your outdoor space. When well-designed, you can use the outdoor space to chill, have fun with the kids, work from home, dine and entertain friends.
If you’ll be selling your home later on, you’ll need to stage your home to entice potential buyers, and that includes your outdoor space. One way you can entice buyers is to clear out your outdoor space. With outdoor living becoming so popular among homeowners today, it’s not surprising that many homeowners are also looking for ways to stage and improve their outdoor space.
Whether it’s for selling to buyers looking firms like Ocean City Development or for your personal enjoyment, you can’t go wrong with making that change. Not only will you have a place for everyone to love, but it’ll also improve your house’s resale value.
To achieve that, here are four efficient steps on staging your outdoor space to help you sell your home for more money and faster too:
1. Declutter
Before applying any new design upgrades in your outdoor living space, it pays to start by decluttering. For many homeowners, the backyard has become a storage space or dumping ground of household items you don’t want to keep inside your home. Usually, they store their junk in their sheds and garages. But when those areas are no longer enough, the backyard area becomes the next victim.
This is the reason why it’s always a good starting point to declutter first. Get rid of anything you no longer need to keep at home. Donate, give, and throw away—these are necessary to achieve whatever new design aspects you’re trying to come up with for your home.
If you’re looking at a mountain of clutter right now and you don’t know where to start, here are some tips that’ll come in handy:
- Organize your outdoor kitchen if you have one so it looks neat and organized. Your outdoor kitchen shouldn’t have the exact same cooking items you already have in your kitchen. It only needs a few seasonal cooking ingredients and items you use when you’re hosting.
- Create a gardening station, usually the shed. Reserve the shed for keeping gardening tools like your lawn mower, just so those items are visually out of the way.
- Create a small storage space for outdoor toys, especially if you have kids. These may include dog accessories, beach toys, bikes, and an inflatable pool and its pump.
2. Consider Nighttime Appeal
In staging your outdoor space, you have to consider how it’ll look both during daytime and at night. This is very important as you can also entertain guests at night, not just during the day. And no matter how beautiful your outdoor space, if it’s not well-lit at night and comfortable, then it’s still not going to be useful.
Don’t forget to include outdoor lighting when staging your outdoor space. These can be anything from lampposts, string lights, ground lights, and even wall lights around your fence.
3. Create Different Lounge Areas
If you have the space for it, you can actually stage your outdoor space in such a way that you have different lounging areas. This is a good way to make the most out of your outdoor space. It’ll be more attractive to your potential buyers when they get excited of the prospect of having so much more use out of that outdoor space.
For example, you already have an outdoor kitchen. If there’s no proper outdoor dining arrangement yet, then you may want to start with that. There are so many outdoor dining sets you can choose from, depending on the size you want, budget, and the style you’re after.
Apart from an outdoor dining area, you can also have outdoor sitting furniture, much like your living room. For those families with young kids, you can never go wrong with garden play sets for the kids to love.
When you purposefully structure your outdoor space to have so many functions in mind, you’re increasing the likelihood of the entire family enjoying the outdoor space, especially during the weekends, and increasing your property’s value.
4. Fix Up Your Front Porch
Outdoor staging isn’t confined only to your backyard. It should also include your front porch or your curb. After all, this part of your home is one of the very first potential homeowners will see. Before they walk in your home and to the backyard, they may already make first impressions based on how your front porch looks like. If it’s nothing close to a welcoming front porch, you should improve that space too.
The easiest way is to keep it clean. You can then add more life to your porch by having plants around the area. Make sure you regularly sweep your front porch, so whenever guests or buyers suddenly arrive, it’s always clean and presentable.
Conclusion
When you’re selling your home, staging your outdoor space is equally important to staging the interior. Don’t let it fall to the wayside, especially when you have quite a huge backyard space. Your home’s interior and exterior go hand in hand, especially now that many families are keen on enjoying outdoor time. While the steps in this post don’t cover all, it’s a good place to start. It’s up to you to add more to your outdoor space to make it more livable or more sellable.