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Despite What You See on TV Home Staging is Not Physical Work

Written by: Debra Gould

Article Overview: The Staging Diva®, sets the record straight for aspiring home stagers worried that a career in home staging means a lot of heavy lifting and other physically taxing duties.

Free Download - Staging Diva Graduate Demonstrates Importance of Sticking to It By Debra Gould
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Despite What You See on TV Home Staging is Not Physical Work

Have you ever noticed how well-dressed the families are when “surprised” by Ty and the rest of the Extreme Makeover crew? What about the fact that everyone is always home the moment the bus pulls up and available on a moment’s notice to go on a one-week vacation?

I hate to spoil the magic, but these houses are being worked on for months before the cameras start rolling. It’s completely unrealistic to believe that an entire house can be demolished, rebuilt, painted and furnished in a week, but it makes for great television!

Like any form of “reality TV”, most decorating shows on HGTV, including those focusing on home staging, are pretty unrealistic. They’re more about “entertainment” then they are about “reality.”

While they might show a home stager going through and cleaning the house, painting the walls, buying the accessories and replacing the hardware and lighting fixtures, that rarely happens in the real world. Plus, few of us arrive with a complete crew including a seamstress to make custom window treatments and cushions on the spot, a carpenter to whip up a wall unit the same morning, or our own electrician!

Think about it. If these shows featured a solo home stager walking through a house telling someone what had to be done and then showing the final product it would be pretty boring to watch.

If you’re using those shows as a guideline for what you might have to do when you’re staging homes, don’t be too quick to assume you’re going to have to do everything yourself or that becoming a home stager means you’ll be physically exerting yourself every day.

If you arrange your business the smart way, you’ll be sourcing other people to do the heavy lifting for you and you can still make money from their services. You don’t have to lift a finger to do anything you don’t want to.

Think of your role as a home stager as being more of a creative director of the entire re-design project.

You have the vision and figure out what needs to happen to make it come to fruition. Put away those cleaning supplies, paint brushes and strategies for lugging heavy furniture around!

You can source the cleaners to give you a fresh canvas to start with, you choose the paint colors and recommend a painter to apply the color to the walls. If you feel the counter tops need to be replaced, you should have a contractor you can recommend to get the job done.

Home stagers come in all shapes, sizes and ages. The eldest graduate of the Staging Diva program is Jean Smith in Florida who is 76 years old. She’s having the time of her life but I can assure you she’s not moving furniture or cleaning floors, and neither do I. I’m 5’1” and a lot of the furniture that needs to be moved is bigger than I am, yet I’ve staged hundreds of homes.

Go ahead and keep watching those HGTV shows, they’re great entertainment and you might pick up design ideas. They’ll help inspire and motivate you in your career as a home stager, but don’t believe everything you see. If you’ve been holding off on starting your career as home stager because you think it will be too physical reconsider that faulty assumption!

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Home > Home-Based-Business > Debra Gould > Despite What You See on TV Home Staging is Not Physical Work
Article Tags: cameras, carpenter, cushions, custom window treatments, electrician, extreme makeover, heavy lifting, hgtv, home stager, home staging, lighting fixtures, magic, painting the walls, real world, reality tv, rsquo, seamstress, staging homes, ty, wall unit

About the Author: Debra Gould
RSS for Debra's articles - Visit Debra's website

Debra Gould, aka The Staging Diva®, is President of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company. Inspired by many requests from aspiring home stagers wanting to start similar businesses, Gould created the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Gould has trained 4000+ students in over 20 countries to start staging businesses. Buying decorating and selling six of her own homes in four years lead to an interest in real estate staging which she turned into a career with the launch of sixelements.com in 2002. Since then she has staged hundreds of homes in addition to teaching home staging training. Gould is the author of several home staging resources including a series of popular home staging guides made up of a Design Guide, Color Guide, Portfolio Guide and Twitter Guide. For more information about Debra Gould visit stagingdiva.com.

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