See How a Stager Used Paint to Transform This Dark Kitchen

A good staging strategy can be successful enough on its own to sell a house. But combining that strategy with a bit of repainting can nab an even faster sale — especially when that fresh coat of paint isn’t on a wall, but the kitchen cabinets.

Molly Marino, the expert home stager and designing real estate broker of Home by Molly Marino, said having her team repaint the wooden kitchen cabinets in a shade of white was a last-minute decision that made a “huge difference” for this four-bedroom, two-bath high ranch-style home in Chicago. 

Here’s how Marino fully transformed the home before listing the property.

It was one of the things she did to compensate for the fact that there was no dining room, just a small area of the kitchen with enough room for a four-person table. And while the kitchen itself was nice, painting the cabinets freshened up the space so much that it even made the granite countertops look new. “It looks redone because the lighter cabinets just lighten the whole thing up,” she says. 

To further distract buyers from the lack of a dining room, Marino set up a cozy living room. When you first enter the home through the bright blue door, you’re greeted by a living room decorated in blues, grays, and creams with light wood accents that evoke a coastal vibe in the Windy City. 

Another staging challenge Marino faced was that the bedrooms were all rather small with “really teeny closets.” One strategy could have been to arrange less or smaller furniture in the room, such as switching from a king-size bed to a queen in the primary bedroom. 

Although effective, Marino wasn’t willing to use that trick for this home. “People are married to their beds,” she says. So she kept the king mattress — along with two nightstands — to overcome any buyers’ objections to the room size.

She put a queen in the second bedroom and a pair of twin beds in the kids’ room, where she kept the herringbone-patterned wall. It was a move that paid off because they “didn’t get any guff” for the small bedrooms, she says. 

Any hesitation buyers had about the smaller living space upstairs likely disappeared upon seeing the fully finished basement, which added an entire floor of living space, including an office and another small living room. 

There’s even a bedroom that lets in more light than one might assume for a basement, although Marino says swapping out the recessed light bulbs to all the same color temperature helped.

 “It’s kind of a nice bonus because most basements are old and hideous,” Marino says, adding that before the owners remodeled, “it was like a wide open, kind of raw basement.” 

It’s hard to find a fully finished basement in Chicago, she says, not to mention one with an updated full bathroom, too.