I found the following article by Pat Jeffries to be inspiring. How fun to pretend you're putting your house on the market and stage it accordingly! See what you think:
"When you're preparing to put a house or condo on the market, you can find a slew of advice on how to make your home look its best for potential buyers. Most of the recommendations can be boiled down into a single word: Declutter. The idea is not just to make the home seem more spacious and inviting -- though streamlining certainly has that effect -- but also to clear out all the distractions and off-putting elements so that home shoppers can more easily picture themselves and their own possessions there.
Often, when a house is ready for sale, the owners realize it feels more beautiful and spacious than it's felt for years. In fact, at least one couple in that situation (according to their home stager's account at MercuryNews.com) decided to pull their house off the market, just because it now looked so much more appealing.
'When the job was done, they couldn't believe it was the same home they had been in for 20 years,' Toni Berry writes. 'They liked it so much that they backed out of the deal on the new place and decided to stay put.'
This suggests that one good way to approach decluttering is to look at your home as if you're staging it for sale. True, you'll want to keep it looking more personal than if it were really for sale, and there's a sharp line between serene and sterile (though any two of us may disagree on where that line runs). Still, when dealing with stuff, a change of perspective can help. And when you've finished staging, you can breathe a big sigh of relief that you're not really moving after all."
More on staging:
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