Several months ago, Dave and I moved out of our house in Texas and into a significantly smaller condo in Colorado. Knowing the size difference in advance, we put our Texas house furniture into storage in Florida, and purchased items to better fit the condo. I’m sure you know, when you put things in storage, even for a few months, you forget what you had. Getting into the storage unit is like shopping for your favorite things all over again. That’s what happened a few weekends ago!
We were ready to furnish and stage our most recent project, and had decided to try to empty the storage unit in the process. Opening the unit door was a little overwhelming, but mostly it was a lot of fun. “Oh, I forgot about this—I love it!” That sentence was shouted many times throughout the day. As we delivered the chosen items to the Coastal Cabin, our most recent vacation rental, there was a bit of a setback. Our home in Texas had soaring high ceilings (14-16 feet in some rooms) and large, open spaces, full of windows. Most of our houses in the Cocoa Beach area were built in the 1950s and have 8 foot ceilings with boxy rooms. Our Texas furnishings were too large for this house (everything is BIG in Texas, you know).
Staging that day became a scale-it-down, scale-it-back undertaking, but we are still very pleased with the results. The ‘scale’ of furnishings is not solely based on size, it is also felt in the ‘bulk’ of the items. I am sure you have walked into a room with furniture that ‘feels’ too big for the room. Everything may ‘fit’ but the style, shape and bulk of the furniture is too big for the size and shape of the room. This is something to be aware of when staging, especially for a client who likes heavier scale styles.
The Coastal Cabin has a long narrow room with a fireplace at the end, but it had formerly been set up without a dining area. I did my thing, and made two distinct areas out of the open space. Once again using area rugs for boundaries and positioning furniture into conversation groups, I gave the room a purpose beyond viewing television. Overall, we had a super fun weekend, getting our newest property ready to go online. It was extra fun to go shopping for all my favorite things, without a sales receipt to go with it.
Getting ready for Thanksgiving!
Karen Conrad Metcalfe