A home is meant to be lived in. Thing is, when it comes to showing real estate, it’s important to suggest how great the place will be to live in rather than how lived-in the place has been.
Signs of aging or wear and tear in a home creep up slowly and subtly. Decline can be so slow that we don’t notice it happening. When is the last time you examined your sofa or upholstered chairs to see how well the fabric is holding up? A close up look can be disconcerting, but if it’s time to show your home, you need to check upholstery for snags, runs, micro-tears, stains and colour-fading.
It’s only in recent decades that our society took to throwing out items that had become worn. Throughout the ages and until the baby-boomer generation, a cradle to grave mentality held true for furniture. When an item became natty, it was glazed in a layer of paint or treated to a new sheen of fabric.
Consider re-upholstering chairs or sofas as an inexpensive and effective way to breathe new life into them. Not only will this offer the chance to make them look ‘good as new’ but it also offers the chance to dress them in the latest fashions.
Take my inexpensive pub table chairs. They had a microfiber seat that looked okay but didn’t create that “wow” factor. I purchased some leather fabric, un-assembled the seats off of the chair base, stapled the new fabric ontop of the seats, re-assembled. Voilà, inexpensive and looks like a million bucks.
Before: Original pub chairs with microfiber seats.
After: After re-upolstering the chairs with a white leather, we added a new table and a healthy bowl of fruit to help the buyer imagine living a healthy lifestyle here.
