Some days I feel like hanging up my design belt and heading on over to Walmart where I can drool on myself and greet toothless visitors with a carefree smile. If someone asked me for a shopping cart, I would hand it to them...JOB WELL DONE. While I often juggle the emotions of moody clients, I'm always fascinated when the battle centers around color, usually when I've stepped in to help sell someones home. When I'm hired to design a space usually I get little to no push back on color choices, but HOLY HANNAH AND HER SISTERS when I suggest (with a gentle touch, of course) to tone down colors in order to appeal to a mass market, people look at me like I've slapped their grandmother. I understand emotional attachments to homes, believe me, I have built a career on helping people fall in love with their spaces, but when it's time to move on, MOVE ON! My number one rule in preparing a house for the market (and I HATE the term "staging") is to begin by removing emotion from the process. When you hire a realtor to sell your home for top dollar, LISTEN TO THEM. When that realtor suggests bringing in a designer, LISTEN. The example above is a home I worked in last year (and the lovely owner knows I talk about the battles we had, but is thankful she finally listened because the house had a full-ask offer shortly after listing). The room above was one of twenty-seven in this home with bold color choices. This particular space, the husbands office, is where I lost my battle and where the final result is one of compromise, but a good example of what COLOR and a tiny bit of editing can do. My main objectives were to remove the dark color to brighten the space, edit about half of the pieces out of the room and off of the walls and change the industrial carpet to hardwood in order to match the rest of the house...and hefty price tag. The compromise was a lighter color (I was going for more neutral tones, but owner insisted on some color, hence the yellow), because she wouldn't change the carpet I introduced an over-sized rug to hide the ugly floor and I decluttered. The only bad part of this room-change was the husband who didn't want to list after seeing it.
