The living room is the first room a potential buyer sees, so after he has seen your perfectly staged exterior, you shouldn’t spoil his mood with the first room he presented. Living rooms offer a lot of space with little or no non-movable furniture (unlike the kitchen or bathroom), thus giving you the chance to express a lot of creativity, but on the other hand, it can be a bit time consuming.

As always, begin staging with cleaning and decluttering. You mustn’t forget you are selling the space, not the owners’ life, and the room most influenced by your lifestyle is usually the living room. It’s not only about removing your cat’s photo from the wall and hiding the fake Chinese vase. Buyers want to invest in square meters of living space and you have to offer it. Remove unused chairs, coffee tables, vase tables and consider renting a sofa set, if your one is oversized. Get rid of the stereo or home cinema system and unnecessary wires too.

If you have nice wooden flooring, show it. Keep just small carpets and rugs under groups of furniture to border the areas. With worn out flooring you should consider at least a cheap (but still good looking) laminate replacement.

Living room is a place of interaction with family members or guests and that should be the main idea of staging this room. Try to arrange the furniture in a conversational way. That means to simplify eye contact and enhance the discussion by removing obstacles between the seated people, like big tables or vases. If you have a fireplace, it’s the natural centre point. If you don’t have one, choose an area near a large window. Keep the furniture away from walls, on the other hand don’t block the traffic flow in the space – keep wide paths among furniture groups.

Spice up the place with a few details. Place carefully chosen pieces of art or decorations in the room. Try to use something colorful and place it in black or white surroundings to stress the freshness of color. Placement at eye-level (especially of paintings) is desired. Live plants or cut flowers are good, but less of them is better than more – you don’t want to turn your living room into a funeral parlour.

Your living room staging is almost done and now you have to just underline the work with proper light. Allow as much natural light as possible, remove any obstacles around windows. Use position lighting to draw attention to the art and architectural details. Choose lights with dimmers, they will be handy during evening staging (but be careful, some cheaper lamps with dimmers create annoying buzzing).