I was amazed to read about all the benefits and positive results associated with staging a home for sale. Thanks for all the staging tips on your website. My husband has been very impressed with the cleaning, clearing, decluttering and rearranging I’ve been doing with most of my own furniture and decorations based on your suggestions. While he loves all the improvements I’ve mad, he stubbornly refuses to budge on one issue. He is an avid collector and I am not allowed to touch his, as he states it “carefully displayed collections.” I have enclosed pictured of just a few of them. They are all over the house. I’ve been a patient wife, meticulously dusting them, cleaning around them, and making room for more. Our realtor thinks we should pack them before the open house. I agree as I’m sure you do too. HELP!

Trudy Melnick
Columbus, Ohio

Dear Trudy,

The advantages to cleaning, decluttering, packing early, and rearranging furniture for optimum visual appeal usually results in a quick sale. When I say usually I mean in almost every case. Buyers are purchasing a home’s architecture and space (closets, cabinets, drawers, walls, floors, etc.) and if your possessions are cluttering it up, they won’t see room for their own things.

It’s purely a psychological thing, but buyers buy based upon emotion and emotion is part of the human psyche. I’m not a psychologist, but I am a professional stager, and I feel that my training, compiled with my experience with buyers, enables me to state with confidence that they want to buy a house that is clean, well-maintained, uncluttered, well-organized, and up-to-date with the latest fashions. And yes, has lots of space for their own stuff. In fact, as they tour your home they will be saying to themselves (and a psychologist can probably verify this one), “I wonder if my sofa will fit in this room.”

Tell your husband that his precious collections must be packed BEFORE the first open house or showing. First of all, they are precious to him and he wouldn’t want them knocked over by accident or slipped into someone’s pocket (on purpose). Take away the temptation and keep them safe by packing them and he’ll have something to look forward to in his new home. And speaking of the new home, I would suggest seeing a psychologist for his obsessive/compulsive behavior of taking over a home with his collections, and your codependent behavior of “meticulously dusting them, cleaning around them, and making room for more.” Just a suggestion.