I am bothered by your agent’s corner-cutting. How can she not understand that staging this home skillfully and exquisitely is a crucial part of its marketing?
Just looked at another listing in our neck of the woods… LOL. The closet was staged with Nordstrom bags! Maybe that’s the route cb has to go. 
I agree, the agent needs to do a bit more for this property than throw together a few pieces from cb’s house.
“and my agent may have made the mistake of telling them that another company was doing the bedrooms”
ya THINK???
your agent should be drawn and quartered for making such an amateurish, BONE HEAD mistake!
How long has she been in the business?? And are YOU her ONLY client?
Sounds like you need to get a more professional agent who KNOWS what and what NOT to say to people.
Well, I hardly think the agent could count on concealing the fact that someone else was staging the bedrooms.
The answer, of ourse, is to have a good company do the whole thing in the first place.
cb, I think the house went on the market in August and the listing was removed in mid-October. It was also apparently featured in the View magazine for October with a full page.
Stagers can be very different in pricing - we considered three companies for our mother’s condo and one was much more than the others. It can be a huge investment. But it is understandable that a company would not want another company involved.
It was my stupid idea to try breaking up the staging cost. But that was before she contacted the new staging companies. I have to be tolerant because we have a commission agreement. She does not get standard commission on my transactions
I used to hang out on a wedding cake baker website. Some of them were driven crazy by people who would take the advice of The Knot to save money by getting a very small wedding cake from a good baker, then buying supermarket sheet cakes for actually serving most of the guests. The guests who were served the crappy supermarket cake mostly assumed that it was the work of the good baker, not that the B&G were saving money by buying a showy cake and then serving them dregs. Not good for their professional reputation, to say the least. I think this is a similar situation. The bakers didn’t mind when someone wanted a smaller tiered cake plus sheet cakes to match from THEM.
Which is a round about way of wondering whether you could save some staging $$ by asking the good staging companies to go light on the first floor bedrooms, for example, or by not staging them at all. (Although I doubt it would save much.)
I’d rather see an empty house than eat crappy supermarket sheet cakes!
Good point. We have learned our lesson. Very similar to the sheet cake example. The high end staging companies do not want their name associated with the low end staging in the bedrooms and/or the staging that is coming over from my house if I can ever find time to break the guys away to go over to my house and start loading my furniture. Not to mention that I will probably have to clean out the truck bed because it is so dirty from hauling to the dump.
My agent has hired Parker Rose Home Staging. They are going to do the living room, dining room and a full patio staging on the big deck off living room (hoping that will turn out nice!). The big question is WHEN they can get over here and stage. All of those areas are ready for staging
I have had my shower glass enclosure for the master bath on order for several weeks. It was supposed to be installed last week. I get a call that they received the glass pieces and there were 2 big scratches. Did I want the glass?? Or should they reorder? Reorder please
They show up yesterday and start putting up the big pieces. Halfway through the job the guy sees a bubble/inclusion/scratch in the middle of the big panel. He calls me in and asks if I want to keep going or reorder for a new piece of glass. If it was my own house I would just give in, but because the defect was right in the middle of the panel and very obvious to the eye I had to tell them to reorder the glass and come back. Now I have giant pieces of glass stored in master bath and have no idea when they will be back. And, it’s in the middle of us trying to get the shower fixtures installed. Oh well, never a dull moment
Our dumbwaiter doors are installed and everything is working great! Last weekend my roofer had all of the old original tiles loaded up onto the top deck to finish the detail install back onto the roof over the kitchen area where we moved all the vents and put in a new furnace vent (which is a horrid 3 ft above the roof and it’s a total eyesore when you are walking up to the house… but has to be that high for final inspection). We used the dumbwaiter to send all the remaining tiles back down to the garage. It was fun!
My carpenter is busy putting in all the bottom rails and top rails for the balconies and decks. Glass company came for final measurement yesterday and we might be getting all the tempered glass panels installed by Friday. That is one of the key issues holding us back from photos (besides no staging furniture in place!). Knowing my luck, the staging company will show up the same day as the glass company is trying to carry in huge panels of glass to the living room deck and up the stairs.
I have purchased pieces and parts of medium grey cabinetry for the master bath vanity and linen closet. There is going to be a lot of customization required and it is going to take some time. I warned my carpenter that he will probably be working all weekend to get all of those items installed. And, of course, my final design doesn’t fit with where the current water pipes and drain pipes are coming out of the wall so he is going to have to open up the wall, make a huge mess, and move all the pipes. He is not a happy camper!
Not sure if you can visualize this but this is how it is going to be configured… 3 sets of 15" drawers with two 21" sink cabinets in between. My undermount sinks are 19" wide for the undermount part and I personally think sink cabinets are just no fun to try to store bathroom items. I would much rather have drawers for functionality. So, we will have very small sink cabinets and a lot of drawers. Then, to the very left (across from toilet room door) I have a recessed 15" deep tall linen cabinet in same cabinetry. I am creating this linen cabinet out of two tall wall cabinets and we will be customizing how they are stacked with some decorative panels that I purchased. The whole thing is going to take some time
I went through the Parker Rose website and chose one example of their photos that I would like for the house. We sent them that photo but all staging contracts say that client does not have the right to refuse the design… they have the right to bring what they want out of their inventory. This is because they cannot guarantee that any one piece is available at any moment and they all hate to have clients try to cherry pick items.
I loaded the photo to Flickr. We will see what we get
I love those two leather-covered benches and the mirror in the background with the arabesque shape. Those pieces especially go with the design of the house. Well, you’ll get what you get.
Does anyone know if stagers have interior design backgrounds?
@coralbrook , that is the exact same photo I picked out from the Parker Rose site and referenced above!
Obviously great minds think alike!
I find it incredible that the glass company is on their third try to provide some pieces of undamaged glass.
What kind of quality control is that? Were these pieces inspected before shipping? I can’t imagine running a business where 2 out of every 3 product shipments had to be returned because of flaws.
The first scratches were discovered by their receiving. 2nd blemish not discovered untilvthey hauled everything upstairs and installed. Now they are telling me they cannot install until next week because their schedule is’busy’. Excuse me…I should get priority! Or at least in my own mind I should:)
I think the issue is that it is a huge piece of glass. It’s wider and taller than normal. They wanted to install next Monday, same day as all the stagers. That would be a disaster. Meanwhile they left large pieces of glass stacked in master bath and we definitely cannot have photos with that mess going on.
That’s terrible! I’d complain to the head of the glass company that this is unacceptable and really no way to run a business!
Parker Rose sent two ladies over yesterday morning. One was the measurer and estimator and the other was an interior designer. So, yes, I had an interior designer through the house.
Also yesterday, another agent came through the house to preview for a family. Finally a family that isn’t looking for a ginormous garage!! She loved it and is going to bring clients through soon
Fingers crossed!!