A staging post

Staging my house. Not dressing it. 'Staging' is the term I should have used, and staging is what I've been doing for the past couple of hours.

Our realtor came round last week, and pointed out where things could be improved. Some we knew about already, some she tactfully suggested. This morning, a couple of friends helped me out. They brought boxes of china and other display items, and they brought fun and a caring desire to help. The china is useful. We put it out on the silly built-in shelving in the sitting room that I've never liked. The fun and the caring desire to help was more than useful.

That's the essence of selling a house, isn't it? It's your home. But that's not what a buyer wants, and therefore that's not what you want to show them. If you came and looked round my house now, in the nicely-themed nook off the kitchen, you'd see a dining table, with a brown table cloth and a fruit bowl on top of it, a scene of a Tuscan landscape on the wall, all muted yellows and oranges, and a corner unit with plants and trailing ivy. I hope you'd think "mmm, what a lovely, welcoming, warm, mellow dining space".

But if you'd come and looked round my home last week, you'd have seen a not-at-all-themed space that I don't think you'd ever have described as a 'nook'. The wall was covered with pictures painted or drawn by my children over the past five years, stuck up with blu-tack. We called it 'the art wall'. Whenever a picture came home from school, if we decided we liked it more than any of the existing ones, an old one was taken down and the new one went up in its space. Some old favourites had been up for years, dusty but undeposed. You'd have seen a bare table, all scraggy with paint, glitter and nail polish - the table that we decided we'd let the kids use for whatever they wanted when they were little, and then we'd sand down and revarnish at some unspecified future time. When do you decide that your children are no longer little? We haven't quite got there yet. 8-yo still paints and glues and snips and jabs at that table, and I still prefer not to have to choose between the table's appearance and the child's creative largesse.

Where the classy corner unit now stands (well, not all that classy actually), you'd have seen a couple of cardboard boxes, labelled '8-yo's second grade work', and '11-yo's fifth grade work'. What else is a mum to do with the generous contents of the Friday folders, week by week?

You'd have seen a big pile of stuff. Stuff? Yes, stuff. I can't find a better word. Next to the stuff, you'd have seen 'the craft chest of drawers' - a truly horrible plastic item, bought from Walmart when we first arrived in the US, desperate for a place to keep under control all the paperwork that was coming at us thick and fast, and now the repository of crayons, pencils, paintbrushes, paints, stamps, inkpads, rubber bands, blu-tack, scotch tape, bows cut off gift bags that might come in useful, scraps of fabric that also might come in useful... you know the kind of thing. I'm missing that horrible, grubby, shabby plastic chest of drawers already.

This is where having friends is so good.

"Oh!" they said. "Your art wall!" they said. "I loved that wall... but yes, I guess you did have to take it down. Wow. I love your Italian theme. That picture is gorgeous. Where did you get that border from? Really? You've always had that border up in your kitchen? How did I never notice the border? It was up when you moved in? And that matching curtain over the top of the window? Really? I guess I was always so busy admiring the art wall that I never noticed. It's great, though... the Italian look... picking up that border. You've done wonders."

House to home was a slow process, and lonely in the early days. Home to house is a quick transformation. It feels almost surgical, removing the bits that don't fit, that aren't needed, that will get in the way, and stitching up with borrowed china and silk flower arrangements. But of course you fool yourself if you think it really is surgical. A home can't be dissected like that. That's why you need surgeons who are friends. They operate with efficiency (they know you're busy) but also with laughter. They choose their words carefully ("A potential buyer might prefer to see an open space here - though I absolutely love the way you have it..."). And most important of all, they know about the art wall.