As you may know, we are preparing to put our home on the market. If you’re planning on selling in this market and you have children like we do (actually we have one), this post will enlighten you!

Just like any other area of your home, staging a child’s room is not about showing your own taste, preferences or personality, much less your kids’! It is about selling the space and making it complement the rest of the home. The purpose of staging a child’s room is to sell the space by allowing the buyers to see their own children in that space, or envision a great guest bedroom. So when staging a child’s room, I recommend that the bedroom be as neutral as possible, and broadly appealing in design.

So here’s what we did in our son’s room:

Before:

Since this picture, we had already updated the bed for a “big boy bed”.  But we also removed Ezra’s name from the wall, and decided to paint the bedroom a more neutral colour that wouldn’t be off-putting for anyone. We decluttered this room by removing the chair and replacing the humidifier with a smaller one.

By the way, remind me to never do stripes again! They look good, but it takes a lot of work to paint over them. First we had to sand the whole wall, then prime the stripes, and then we had to do three coats of paint in this one bedroom!

But the result is amazing:

When we show the house, we will remove the gate on the bed!

So as you can see, we used pretty much everything we already had. Paint is the most drastic change in this room.

If you are also putting your home on the market, take inventory of what you have, even items from other rooms, to stage each area of your home.

I think the most important aspect of staging a bedroom, especially a child’s room, is to remove all personal identifiers without exception. Your kids’ photos, certificates, sports jerseys, school accessories and even clothing items with their names on them should be removed and stored away or offsite. Aside from the staging rule of depersonalising the home, it helps protect your kids’ identities from harmful people as well.

There is more to come on the staging front… Stay tuned!