The $1 Upgrade My Stager Made Me Buy Before I Listed My House (It’s So Unexpected!)
When I was preparing my house to sell this summer, I had some big-ticket tasks to complete that cost a pretty good chunk of change. I replaced upgraded aging appliances that were reaching the end of their life cycles and starting to groan — there went $12,000 for a new, energy-efficient HVAC system and another $3,000 for a water heater. Then there were expenses like repairs here and there I hired a handyman to do ($1,500), plus paint touch-ups ($1,500), a carpet cleaning ($300) and a deep clean of my house ($300).
After factoring in all of those expenses, I was relieved that my home stager had some great ideas that could be done on the cheap — including an easy dollar store swap for my main bathroom.
As part of my staging consultation, Paola Torres, the owner of Happy Ambience Home Staging, pointed out some of the things that I could do to make my home look its best for photos and during open houses. I put a layer of paint over the desk in my home office to cover scratches and followed the 1/5th rule for thinning out my closets and kitchen drawers so buyers could more easily imagine themselves in the space.
But my favorite staging trick she relayed to me involved trading out my fancy shower rings for cheap, plastic ones from the dollar store — because the inexpensive ones glide and stay put the best. (That’s not the only thing Torres likes on a budget: I learned that she also likes to get $8 sheer curtains from Walmart to let light in and hit up the dollar store for small baskets to corral remotes.)
Her suggestion regarding the shower rings, though, surprised me at first. The gold S-shaped rings I had on my shower rod were, simply, aesthetic. I think I spent $25 on them a couple of years ago when I was sprucing up my main bathroom in order to give the whole space a much more put-together look. While the Dollar Tree ones are the cheapest, you do have to buy them in bulk if you buy them online, not in person, but there were still some cheap Walmart ones that were easy to buy online and just as minimalistic.
But while they may have been cute to look at, they were kind of a hassle to use. When I bought them, I had no idea that the hooks, as pretty as they are, would get caught on the metal shower rod when you tried to pull back the curtain, and that, because of their “S” shape, they’d also come unhooked frequently, separating from the shower liner.
If I were still living in my house, I could fix those snarls as they arose, but I’ve already moved into my new home and check up on my for sale house every few days. That meant that if a potential buyer pulled back the curtain (no pun intended) they might find an annoyingly onerous shower curtain set-up, and if it unhooked, that it might look like that for days and for subsequent showings, making the home look a little messier and a lot less put together.
The TL;DR? “Anything you can do to make it easier on the buyer is a good thing,” Torres told me.
To Torres, even a shower curtain that can (or can’t) easily be pulled back is one of those small things that make showings and open houses go better (or worse). It’s right up there with having doors that gently close, drawers that slide open without getting caught, and spaces that are decluttered and depersonalized.
I also wanted to make it as easy as possible for buyers to see this main bathroom, because it has a large soaking tub, rainfall showerhead with a handheld spout and, one of my favorite features in the entire home: A small window that faces the mountain and has the best fall foliage views each September and October, making for the most relaxing showers.
The other upside of those reliable plastic rings? They don’t rust like their metal counterparts. I’m officially a convert!