Make every nook of your home beautiful.

We love taking tips and examples from our home stagers. They are professional experts on making a house feel like a work of art and have been so kind to give us a few pointers on how to live in a home that feels like it's ready for company at any moment. The key to everything: make every nook of your home beautiful. Here's how to do this in 5 steps...

1. Refresh your perspective. Go out of your front door and take a deep breath. Imagine you are someone else, a buyer, a long lost friend, a realtor, perhaps. Then open your front door and look at it from their perspective. What catches your eye? How would you describe the space? What does the flow of the house feel like? These may seem like very esoteric or odd things to think about, but it works.

2. Declutter. Face it, almost all of us have too much stuff. We collect. Our kids bring home clay sculptures from art class. We receive gifts. Things accumulate. We understand how this happens. It's probably time to weed. The easiest way to start is to remove everything to what we like to call "neutral ground"; (we call that the patio).

3. Sort like items. If you have a collection, you're already on the road to success. Collections are so easy to show off: cameras, baskets, pottery, hats, sculptures, books...those are all easy collections to display. If you don't collect a certain thing, you actually might and just not know it! Pull out all of the objects d'art and sort them by color. There might be a collection there that can be displayed artfully.

4. Create little scenes when you invite items back inside. You have a corner, a card table that is rarely used, an old office chair, and a lamp. You also have last year's greeting cards, and a few coordinating odds and ends. This can become a corner that says, "This is where I write greeting and thank you cards and appreciate correspondence," (whether or not you do any of that).

5. Become your own superhero. Scrub the whole property for areas at loose ends like you're a super crime-fighter/game-changer. Do you have a corner full of boxes of returns? That might become a little creative thinking nook. Is your side yard full of detritus waiting for bulk pick-up? That might be a meditation spot. (This exercise isn't just for interior spaces.) Go after the unnecessary items you have as if they are evil-doers and transform them. There are plenty of second-hand stores waiting for your extra inventory (no matter how expensive it was or who gave it to you as a gift).

The key thought process is that each one of your spaces can be made beautiful by creating little scenes that tell a story--and to your own surprise, you might start using them. Just remember, nothing is set in stone. You can repurpose any corner for another beautiful use. We recommend using Pinterest (or our listings) for ideas.

So, no matter if you are selling or just want to live in a beautiful home that looks like someone staged it, we hope that these pointers help you make your spaces look gorgeous.