Feng Shui
Today at C.A.R. Expo, I walked into a room what I thought was a class about staging and marketing of your listing. I later found out the topic was inadvertently changed to Feng Shui. Being somewhat familiar with this topic, I was going to walk out but various topics made me stay all the way through. The presentation was not so esoteric as some Chinese Feng Shui theories, and I received a fresh look from a Western point of view. Many of the points are just plain common sense. The speaker showed us why some homes are just not selling even the prospects have no apparent objections but somehow don't have good overall feelings about it. Some of them are:
- House numbers are to be placed horizontally, not vertically.
- The front door of the houses in certain areas, such as beach communities, are not visible. For these kind of properties, put a wind chime, decorative flag, or some type of slow moving or waving objects to cause attention. Also put something red in the front door area to create fire element.
- No trash cans on the entrance side. Get rid of tired old furniture at the front porch. And no sticky door handles.
- Use little crisp borderline to delineate the grass area and sidewalk or asphalt.
- Open up the space in entrance area. If not, put up a mirror to create water sign.
- Put all the books on the bookshelf straight up, not horizontally or mixed. Align the spines of the books forward (outside) so that there's no zigzag shape. No parallelogram or slanted style bookshelves, either.
- If first thing you see when walking into is a master bedroom is a big view, it's a divorce house. The bed should be the focal point in the room, no treadmills, cat litter box next to the bed. If no avail, put extravagant decoration on or around the bed to shift focus.
- Put the toilet lid down. Put a flower in a bathroom with no windows to give signs of life even without light.
- Water is money, fix any leaks and drips in the house. Encircle the water pipes, sink pipes, washer hose with red tapes to increase the profit on the sale of a house.
- No more than 50% of the area on top of the piano, fireplace mantel should be covered by objects or photo frames.
- Get the main furniture in each room at the command (arm chair) position, back should not face entrance or guests.
- People associate blue color with sky or water, so no blue color carpets. It doesn't give you a stable walking experience when walking on water or space. Use earth tone color for floors.
- No still life such as dead flower, pine cones, dried wreath in the bedrooms. Add life.
- Space clearing ritual, i.e. death in a room: burn salt. Put some (epson) salt in a cup and add some alcohol (rum or whisky), then light it up until fire is out. This will cleanse the room
- For more information, about the speaker, go to www.FengShuiNAR.com