One of the most frequently asked questions from our students and those getting started in the industry…..
We’re just starting up our home staging business and we really need to know about how you do your beds.
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?
Let’s look at our options when we are deciding on beds to use for an installation of a property for sale.
The first option is, obviously, a traditional slatted timber bed that needs to be pretty much built on site. It has the side rails that has the header and the footer and the slats that the mattress would sit upon. There’s one option.
The next option is an ensemble bed. So the traditional base and mattress.
The last option is a bit of a more temporary bed. It may be an inflatable bed, it may be a camp stretcher with an inflatable mattress on top or it may be a camp stretcher with a foam mattress on top.
These are all different sorts of options. That’s not all of them, but they are some of the different options that you have when you’re staging a property and you want to put in some beds.
What do we do? If I’m going to be dead honest about what we did when installing for my home staging business, we actually used a lot of ensemble beds.
We used to use the slatted headers and footers with the side rails, but the time it took to construct the beds on site meant that our productivity was greatly diminished.
And that meant that we needed more than one person to be on site installing every single house, even after the initial drop off of furniture was complete by the muscle, basically. That was a bit of a negative for us. It really did take some time.
The other thing we noticed is that the mechanisms that you’re adhering everything to did, over time and after multiple assembling and disassembling, wear. We steered away from that.
That pointed us to our ensemble beds.
We have, as well, used all varieties of camp stretchers and foam mattresses/camp stretches and air mattresses, but one of the big problems we found with air mattresses was that sometimes they do go down.
You often find that the time you get a call is 7:30/8:30/9:00/10:00 on a Saturday when, often, you’re busy doing other things, saying,
“I’ve just taken everyone into an open home and the mattress is deflated. I need something else here right now because the open home has pretty much been ruined by the fact that there’s a deflated mattresses and a slump-looking bed sitting in what might have been an amazing master suite before.”
One of the problems I have with inflatable beds is they certainly have their locations, but one of the things that you need to make sure you think about is they aren’t 100% reliable.
I can probably hear many people going, “What about those places where you can’t get an ensemble base into?” Absolutely right. It’s a huge, huge challenge.
There are many places, especially in the older parts of town, where the stairwells are too skinny and the lifts are too small and the landings at the top of stairs are too small to be able to work an ensemble base around.
In those cases, we actually have to use a mattress and we prop the mattress up on tubs. The same tubs that we use to pack the bedroom accessories and linen etc.
There you go. There are our sneak peeks and our behind the scenes of what we did while staging a home for beds. I hope you’ve learned something from that; I hope that there’s something that you can take and integrate into your home staging business and into all the different situations that it may be applicable.
If you have really specific questions about your business, make sure you check out our memberships. Our Professional Membership has a closed Facebook forum where you can pretty much ask anything you want.
The members of the community and myself will be jumping in there to help. Pop over and check them out. They’re all on the website.