Styling your apartment before putting it up on the market provides a good starting point for getting attention among home-buyers. Stylish and good-looking homes attract more buyers and help to show the full potential of the apartment. In best case it reduces the sales time and has a positive effect on the sales price. In order to style your home you can seek the help of a professional, but there is also a lot you can do yourself. We gathered 10 simple tips and a real life example of how you can style your apartment yourself.
1. Make The Most Of Your Style
Before embarking on any major changes to your apartment, you should assess how your current style looks at its best. Start by cleaning the apartment thoroughly. Remove the signs of everyday life – as in toys, dishes, laundry and personal hygiene products. Also personal items like photographs and fridge notes and extra furniture and clothes should be hidden temporarily.
2. Assess The Space And Gather Ideas
When your apartment is clean and organized, you can more easily evaluate the space and possible changes. Take photos of each room and list the features of the space in order to evaluate what kind of use the space is best suited for. Once you have mapped the space, you can start collecting ideas and inspiration. The easiest way to do this is by creating a Pinterest or Instagram album for each room and collecting ideas for possible room choices.
A picture of our example home after cleaning and adding some plants to the interior. (Photo: Blok)
3. Make Your Space More Spacious By Reducing Furniture
Our example home is a studio in Espoo, which we styled together with the owner of the apartment. The furnishing of the living room took up too much space and made the space look constricted. The dining table was used rarely and even then, mainly for work. The two-seater sofa was usually used by only single person. To free up more space the resident decided to remove the two-seater sofa, the coffee table and the dining table.
4. Define The Colour Scheme
Also think about what kind of colour combinations you want into your home. You should choose a couple of neutral background colors and a couple of contrasting colors in the colour scheme. In the example home, the background color was chosen as white and light gray, and the contrasting colors were green, red and black.
5. Add Plants And Flowers To The Space
Adding green plants and flowers to the interior of the apartment becomes much more cozy. Plats fit almost any decoration style and bring life into the interior.
6. Paintings
Empty walls make the space generic and impersonal. By framing your photos, interesting objects, posters, and art, you can create an interesting home gallery.
7. Open Storage Space
Bring more detail into the space with open storage space where you can display decorative objects and green plants. In our example home, we removed a few storage boxes from the shelf and placed a few books and a small painting there.
8. Mirrors Make The Space More Spacious
Especially in small spaces, such as corridors or small rooms, it is advisable to add wall mirrors. A mirror makes even a tiny space feel more spacious.
A sketch from the planning phase (Picture: Jinyi Su)
9. Smart Scheduling Of Furniture Purchases
When you sell your current home you may already have a new home in mind and ideas for how you want to decorate it. In such cases it might be worthwhile to consider purchasing the furniture for the new home in advance use it to style the old apartment. For instance, the owner of the apartment had planned to purchase the chair and the desk to her new home, and decided to buy it now to decorate her old home.
10. Get The Final Touches From An Auction
Everything doesn’t need to be brand new. Many auction houses offer interesting furniture, art and other interesting items for your interior with reasonable prices. A classic Louis Poulsen's design lamp was purchased from Bukowski’s online auction to add an extra sparkle to the interior.
The end result captured by a professional photographer. Removing all excess furniture made made the space more spacious, and the new furniture made the overall impression more stylish. (Photo: Blok)
