Home Staging. Designs. Life.

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Those are some fighting words!


 

Most of you probably don't this about me, but I practice and teach yoga in my spare time to help balancing my sanity and spirit. I normally don't talk about it since I prefer to seperate my staging life & my yoga life. (Wouldn't it be weird to see your stager teaching you yoga?!) But I got an email from one of my teacher yesterday that really put me into deep thoughts about our staging industry.

This is a very senior and very famous teacher in America and possibly in the world, who has come to a unresolvable dispute (lawsuits are involved) with a yoga studio chain aborad who uses the same name as his yoga program. He was upset to see his years of work of cultivating his program and his branding is risked being confused by a yoga chain. I have studied with him in person and found him to be a wealth of resources and knowledge and he is an individual that I respect full-heartedly. But who really owns "rights" over a word? Or the school of thoughts, philosophy and movements that have been around for thousands of years? And since when yoga has become a materialisic and capitalistic notion that can be "copyrighted" or "trademarked?"

Similarly in the staging world, there are TONS of staging schools out there and are only getting more and more as days go by and media keep educating consumers the wrong way (please, HGTV shows you selling a home on a $2000 budget? They forget to add the professional labor and costs!). As a consumer, he/she probably doesn't know one staging school from another, let along of what does it matter as long as the work is good. And they probably don't care as long as their stager can do his/her job right and sell the house off quickly and overasking. But this also poses a danger and concern for the consumer who doesn't know any better about who exactly he/she is hiring. They don't know that there are no industry standard of pricing, ethical behaviors or consumer rights. What can stop an unethical stager from over-charging or do sellers & agents disservices by not informing them their best staging solutions/options?

Is it also right to fight within the industry just because we have different schools of thoughts? Different trainings? Different backgrounds? Out of the 15,000 population of the town I reside in, 600 of them are realtors. Isn't there enough business for all of us?

 

***This blog is also posted on Cindy's cleaner version of staging blog: http://stagingtipsandmore.blog.com/1651803/ Feel free to leave comments & thoughts on there too :) 

2 comments • Cindy Lin // Staged4more & EcoJoe • March 30 2007 04:36PM

Bye Bye Mess, Hello Peace of Mind!

It's funny how as I staging people's homes for a living and constantly nagging them to de-clutter and get organized, I am shockingly disorganized and all my papers are basically tucked in various corners of my house and stacked skyhigh on my desk. Well, not anymore. I have actually taken some steps to reclaim my office space and reclaim my sanity (also, make it easier for myself next year when tax time comes!)

Well, as I have always advised my clients to remember to breathe & take baby steps, I am following my own advices. There are some crucial steps to tackle this:

  1. Announce your cleaning goal to the world (this may help you to motivate yourself to clean so you don't feel shameful at family gatherings...)
  2. Breathe
  3. Take baby steps... cleaning one little bit at one time. Do it in small increment, like 15-30 minutes.
  4. When hitting a wall (or close to hitting your own head on the wall), remember to BREATHE
  5. Repeat this every ____ (set your own schedule and stick with it. I would also recommend to get a buddy who will actually hold you accountable for best result!)
  6. Remember to step back and admire results every once awhile. And treat yourself for that extra *** (donut, boaboa ice tea, fill in your own temptation)

 And ah-ha! Also arm yourself with effective tools.  I have 3 basic things that I use now constantly:

  1. A label maker (I use the brother's one, but am going to switch to dyno soon because it has more variety, MUCH easier to buy replacement tape, less flimsy)
  2. Organization boxes (I love IKEA's Kassett series of boxes with lids in various different sizes, especially for projects and receipts that are still need to be filed for expense reports. No more worrying about receipts falling out of my folders!)
  3. My NeatReceipts scanner: this thing is absolutely a godsend. It scans, anaylzes and organizes my receipts. Takes seconds to scan and the report is compatible with tax softwares. Not to mention it not only just scans receipts, it can scan business cards, documents, basically anything scannable. *It's really magical.*

You can get one too at www.neatreceipts.com

 

I look forward to share pictures of my newly organized office soon! (Wll, by "soon," I mean 3 months...) Feel free to share your home organization goals here. it really pays to be more organized! it will just save you so much time and money for being on top of your paperwork. So messy paper people everywhere, let's unite and reclaim our sanity!

6 comments • Cindy Lin // Staged4more & EcoJoe • March 29 2007 01:22AM