Home Tour Advice
As a design blog reader, I am guessing you may have a tour-worthy home. There was a fun article in the AJC recently that included the following advice for those who are getting ready to show off all their hard work:
Thinking about putting your house on tour?
Chris Wilkinson has some advice.
1. Use common sense about your things. If you have something special you’re worried about, put it away for the weekend.
2. Recruit your friends to work in your home during the tour. It’s a lot less stressful when you know the people who will be sitting at your house. I told my friends there would be beer and snacks and I expected each one of them to give us two hours. They willingly obliged, and I very much appreciated it.
3. Make up a fact sheet about your house and then let people ask you questions if they want to know more. Offering a guided tour will just exhaust you.
4. There will be lots of strangers and you might hear something you don’t like, but overall it’s a positive experience.
5. Relax and enjoy yourself. Then the people who come to your house will relax and enjoy themselves, too.
Have you ever participated in a Home Tour? How was the experience? I hear horror stories from friends about busting nosy neighbors poking through their medicine cabinets during Open Houses when they put their homes on the market. O.K., maybe they were neighbors in need of an intervention for something besides nosiness. Anyway, I’d be very flattered if someone asked me to participate in one, but I’m not sure I’d ultimately be comfortable with it.
June 27th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Our house was on the 1990 Morningside Tour of Homes. We aren’t designers or real estate people. We are proud of our place and flattered to be asked.
We weren’t at the the house during the tour. Memories:
1. Gordon, our designer friend, worked so hard to get it together. He know what to do. We all worked until 4am the morning before before the tour.
2. The folks who “sat” our house took great care of it. They passed on lots of nice compliments.
3. Ours was the best house on the tour in the sense that it was obvious that a family of 5 with 3 small children lived there. It seemed normal and scaled with the old neighborhood.
4. I guess the tour is a bit of prestige when we sell. We framed the tour yard sign.
5. We’d do it again if we could get a pro to clean and stage it.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Hi Terry, we are practically neighbors, I live in Va-Hi, about 1/4 mile from Morningside. So glad to here that you kept your house in the old neighborhood scale. If one neighborhood seems to have been hit worse than mine on the McMansion front, it’s Morningside (as I say this, they are grading the tiny lot next to me in preparation for the $1.2 million faux Craftsman they are going to build next door, which is wedged between me and the huge fakey faux stone brick tudor monstrosity built a few years ago.). I walked Hillside the other day and so much of the new construction was just so appallingly ugly. I hope this real estate slumps stops the ugly tasteless spec houses for awhile!
becky
July 1st, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I actually organized a Home Tour in our neighborhood of Bird Rock in La Jolla two years ago. It was an amazing experience for me because I was able to recruit four other neighbors for the tour in addition of my own home. I couldn’t ask other people to open their homes if I didn’t too. We opened our homes to raise money to build a gate to our local park. The night before the Home Tour I brought a bottle of wine to each homeowner and thanked them for opening their homes. I could not believe the response. We had over 400 people buy tickets (not all came) to support our neighborhood. What appealed to everyone I spoke to was that the money we raised stayed in our neighborhood. Also, I thanked every single person who bought a ticket. People were so gracious and came back at the end of the tour and said how well it was put together. I can say that at the end of this summer, Bird Rock will have a wonderful new entrance to our neighborhood park. I can’t wait to see it!