Home staging, or making trash look like a million bucks.

I started this post some time ago but just got the pictures in today...

We've made progress on the refinishing, and the dejunking, and the painting.

One of the large projects was the kitchen. Although I can see all the flaws in workmanship, others - including our Realtor - have raved over the results.
After we'd progressed most of the way in refinishing (and maybe halfway in dejunking) the intensity of my travel schedule increased sharply. While I was gone on my first trip this month to the land of papa's father's birth I received an urgent email from Pooka asking about a major furniture purchase for our front room.

I couldn't see the point. Our front room furniture, consisting of a well fingerprinted beautiful black piano and two large green leather couches, are the most expensive pieces we've ever ever ever owned. (Obvious to many of you - we didn't purchase any of them. We just somehow manage to look needy enough that people give us stuff when they move away or when they inherit an instrument they don't play.) So I thought the ensemble was as good a shot at making a front room look nice as we could reasonably make. But Pooka knew better.

She knew better not just because she is a visionary woman, but because she'd studied it out and had decided that the family room couches had to go. They had three strikes against them. First, they were worn. Second, they needed steam cleaning ($160). And third, they were blue. The third strike was the worst!

Maybe it was good that I was away. By the time I returned home I'd realized that we'd spent almost as much on a kitchen floor as Pooka was proposing for new front room furniture. And that anything we purchased would likely go with us. (Note to self: remember to leave kitchen floor when moving.) And that showing a home was a large enough source of stress that it was worth the difference just to improve Pooka's peace of mind.

So we ordered the new furniture, moved one set of couches, had Goodwill reject the other set, and cleared *everything* off our mantle. (This last is no small feat. The mantle served as the shelf for our DVD collection, Pooka's folk instrument collection, an array of trophies for sports and music, and as a sargasso for any item which ought to be kept from shorter residents.) We did get Goodwill to accept the blue couch after a scratch was repaired, but the loveseat was rejected because when the legs fell off I'd replaced them with 2x4's.

But this is the subject of this post. The loveseat was one of the pieces of trash. Normally it would have a value of negative $35, because we'd have to pay to have it hauled away. In this case it was disassembled. Most of the wood was burned and padding and fabric placed in the trash, but the back of the loveseat had a wooden ornament which formed the nucleus of our new headboard.


Another piece of trash is placed prominently in our front room between the two new chairs. It doesn't look like trash because Pooka has a nice set of tablecloths to drape over it and a fruitbowl full of apples on top of it. It's had better days and gone through a major repair. (For some reason it wasn't constructed strong enough to serve as a stage.) It joined our household after a long and useful life in someone else's and after several years of increasingly rickety service was slated for the burnpile along with the aforementioned couch parts.

Of course - as part of dejunking we had some help from our ward. Especially on the cleaning. But it is extremely important to be thorough in this kind of work so we got some additional helpers to take care of the crumbs:


Now you may think that the idea of dressing up a home with trash is a bit buggy, but all gussied up that trash does just fine.