How often to you paint your house? Most likely infrequently and then there are those who just don’t think of it…ever. Over the last 2 months I’ve worked with clients who wanted help with color selection but were being rushed to do so by their painter. HUH? I’m not sure how this timeline happens but let’s break this down. You want to change the color of your space. You want help making color selection but your contractor is putting pressure on you so they can fit YOU in THEIR schedule. Stop the insanity!

It is your house. Take your time. Select your colors. Contact the painter. Same rule applies to any contractor for that matter. In 2 situations with clients with everyone operating under pressure to make selections to accomodate the painter, the painter rescheduled last minute.

Stop the insanity

Who is in charge here? The homeowner should always be incharge.

Yesterday I staged Jeannie Costanzo’s, Keller Williams Orange County Market Center in Goshen, recent listing in Tappan, NY. The home was beautifully updated and decorated. The only rooms that needed a bit of tweaking were the living room and family room.

The walls of a room define the space. The furniture that fills the space creates the space and defines the function of the space. Furniture does not have to be placed against the walls. In many cases, especially in living rooms, shoving the seating against the wall disconnects not only the furniture but the people within the space.

The simple solution for both the living and family room of this house was to bring the furniture into the space to create a conversational area. Now the people who will experience the space can not only connect to each other but can now comfortably view the televsionno matter where they are seated.

Feedback from the homeowner: “We love it and the changes make sense”.

A special thank you from Project CARD ONE

For the last few years I had the privledge to spread the word about a special project that sends greeting cards to our troops overseas.

Michelle Little-Oresto, organizer of Project CARD ONE is still receiving shipments of cards from my column in December for Christmas 2012. She told me to thank my readers of my “Claudia’s Corner” column. “Their beautiful words of hope, strength and gratitude mean the world tour soldiers. I appreciate all the helping card angels that have supported our project”, says Michelle.

The cards were shipped to our troops. The project was gifted by a kind father who was able to ship the cards directly to his son who is stationed in Afghanistan. “Foster” mentioned both his son and the troops loved the cards. They would like to receive letters and cards throughout the year.

Michelle is getting a shipment together for Valentine’s Day and collecting blank stationery so that the troops can have their own cards to write if they wish. Stationery is in short supply for the troops.

Huge boxes of card donations were received from the name sake of the project, Tony and Fran Cardone and their family at Fran’s Hallmark in Monroe.  Students of the S. S. Seward School in Florida held a card signing day at the school. The offices of Orange County DMV started “The Giving Gang of Orange County”. Cards were coordinated by 911 Emergency Services Department in Goshen and The Balfour Beatty residents of West Point.

Just this past weekend I gathering up a stack of cards from this year and a bunch I found in my file cabinet that have collected over the years. Instead of holding on to them I will ‘pay it forward’ to honor the service men and women.

Save this year’s holiday cards! Talk about going green for such a wonderful cause. To participate in Project CARD ONE, please donate used or new holiday cards by tearing off the decorative front to create a postcard, then either write a personal message to a service member or leave blank.  No envelope is needed.  Cards may be mailed to

For more information on Project CARD ONE, please contact Michelle Little-Oresto at mikil43@verizon.net.

We’ve been busy updating the site. My blog will return soon!

Goodness, what a spate of rough weather we’ve had here in the Hudson Valley lately! But of course, I missed some of it because I was in Nevada.

I’m happy to report I brought back more than bronchitis from the Real Estate Staging Association conference in Las Vegas. No, I didn’t hit the jackpot in the casino, but it is official! I am truly honored to share the news of winning RESA’s 2011 Staging Professional of the Year award for the Northeast region. It is a huge accomplishment to be recognized by my industry peers and judges, and I have to thank you, my readers, too, for your encouragement.

The always engaging and entertaining Matthew Finlason of HGTV’s “The Stagers” was our closing keynote speaker. His presentation on what he calls “lifestyle merchandising” was truly inspirational and will cause the staging industry to take it to another level by dialing in to a specific buyer.

Finlason suggested stagers should stop neutralizing and not sterilize spaces. He says buyers are suffering from neutral fatigue. There is a quote in my PowerPoint presentation on real estate staging from a Realtor in California that says how we are selling a lifestyle, not a house. The buyers’ potential new home must be the vision of how they want to live, not how they are living now.

Thanks to all the staging shows on television, consumers are very much aware of staging. It is important to understand lifestyle and how people live in their space. It is important is research, analyze and create a demographic of the buyer. This markets a lifestyle that appeals to the dreams of the buyer. In other words, create a story.

The last vacant staging I did of a model home was in an area near West Point. They were appealing to the traditional military family coming to the East Coast from anywhere in the USA. They did not want anything too modern or urban.

This contradicts the taste of someone already living in one of the townhouses who had quite contemporary taste, with furnishings from West Elm. My selections were more transitional in style, incorporating a traditional look with contemporary accessories.

While listening to the builder and the real estate agent, I could have come up with a story profiling a family relocating to upstate New York from Small Town, USA. The father grew up as an Army brat, is married, with two daughters, and all the wife and girls can dream about it the close proximity to Woodbury Common shopping outlets. As much as the father wanted to dominate the house with his military paraphernalia and love of Army football, he was far outnumbered by high levels of estrogen. And then …

At the Las Vegas conference, Finlason did call all of us in his enthusiastic audience “a quarter-cup of crazy” for being stagers. I guess I just proved his point with my imagination coming up with that family of four. Or maybe it is all the medication from the bronchitis. Either way, I will be getting a lot of mileage from that phrase “quarter-cup of crazy.”