Before moving any item of furniture, picking up a paint brush, or packing anything away, I like take notice of how the present day owners use the property.
It is surprising how many people living in a multi-roomed property only use a fraction of those rooms on a constant basis, and then wonder why their potential buyers view the home as small.
Buyers are looking for square footage, and they need to see how each room functions, so it is important to ensure each room has a clearly designated function and never more than two functions to a room.
I recently completed a walk through on a property that had 3 bedrooms, two bathrooms and an on-suite in the master, one kitchen, a very small dinning room, a formal living room, a family room, a completely finished basement that was being used for storage and hanging laundry on the unused gym equipment, a laundry room and another room, completely finished with a window in the basement, currently being used as a storage room
Its present day owners only made use of the Master bedroom and on suite, the kitchen, the family room and used one of the extra bedrooms as an office. All the rest of the rooms, were full of things just placed and left. Presented in this way, the home looked to the viewer as a one bed-roomed house, with a living room, no room for the family to come over for dinner ever, and everywhere else had to be used for storage, not exactly what a young family with a child/children would want in this transitioning neighbourhood.
So the suggested change, Move the office to the basement, and there was more than enough space to relocate the family room into this beautiful space. The house had a huge crawl space totally unused. So they need to store everything from the extra room in the basement into that crawl space, this leaves this extra room to be shown as a guest bedroom, there is a full downstairs bathroom right next to it. The laundry room was well laid out and only needed a cupboard to put the necessary items in.
On the main living level, minor changes in the kitchen, move the beautiful antique dining room furniture into the old family room, along with a no longer used, but had to be kept piano and now you can entertain 12 people or more around the extended table with ease.
The formal living room now minus the piano could be laid out to maximize the traffic flow, and the old dining room can now have a smaller eating table with comfortable chairs making it a casual eating area.
So now potential buyers walk around a property and see, three bedrooms upstairs all shown as bedrooms only, one on-suite and one full family bathroom.
A Formal living room, a formal dining room and a casual eating area, around the kitchen
Downstairs in the basement a large family room, a small but functional office area, a laundry room, a full bathroom and a functional guest bedroom. Plus they get to see the neatly arranged and reduced storage items in the crawl space.
Then we moved onto all the other things needed to bring the home out of the 1980's. But thats another story.
