Occupied staging
Occupied home staging
Your house, still lived in, staged so buyers read the space instead of the belongings in it.
Do I have to move out to stage my home?
No. Occupied staging is built for a house you still live in. Andrea Wetzel works with the furniture already in the room, edits what is on the surfaces, and brings in only what is missing. Cricket on the Hearth keeps the property livable through the listing period, so the house is still a house between showings.
It is the first question almost everybody asks, and the answer is the reason occupied staging exists as its own service. A vacant property gets furnished from scratch. A property you live in gets edited, and editing is a different job with different skills.
What that means in practice: most of what a room needs is already in it. The sofa is fine. The problem is that it is against the wall the eye lands on first, the console behind it holds eleven things, and the room has no clear path through it. Buyers do not consciously notice any of that. They notice that the room feels smaller than the square footage said.
What moves and what does not
Stays
- Most of the furniture the room already holds.
- The beds, and a kitchen you go on cooking in.
- Everything you own. Nothing is thrown out.
- Nothing is bought without your say.
Moves
- Pieces off the wall the eye lands on first.
- Most of what is sitting on the surfaces.
- A few pieces, into another room.
- A small number of things come in from outside.
How it runs
The walkthrough
Andrea walks the property with you, room by room, and takes notes on what stays, what moves, and what gets brought in. This is where the sorting happens: some houses need two rooms touched, some need every room.
The written plan
You get a plan with a scope and a timeline, not a verbal impression. It names the rooms, the moves, and anything to be sourced, and the quote is built from it.
Staging day
The moves happen. Furniture is re-placed to open sightlines, surfaces come down, and what the room was missing arrives. Most of the work is subtraction and placement.
Through the listing
The house goes back to being a house. The plan leaves you a short reset list for the handful of things to square away before a showing, and nothing on it takes more than a few minutes.
Downtown Edwardsville, occupied, 2020
Common questions
Living in it
Do I have to move out to stage my home?
No. Occupied staging is built for a house you still live in. Andrea Wetzel works with the furniture already in the room, edits what is on the surfaces, and brings in only what is missing. Cricket on the Hearth keeps the property livable through the listing period, so the house is still a house between showings.
What happens to my furniture during occupied staging?
Most of it stays. Andrea Wetzel re-places what the room already holds, moves pieces off the walls to open the sightline, and reduces what is on the surfaces. Some pieces move to another room and a few come in from outside. Nothing is thrown out and nothing is bought without your say.
Can we live normally while the house is listed?
Yes. Occupied staging at Cricket on the Hearth is designed around that. The kitchen still works, the beds are still slept in, and the plan tells you the handful of things to reset before a showing. Andrea Wetzel builds it so a family can hold it without a daily production.
Still living there?
Andrea walks the property, writes the plan, and quotes the work. Edwardsville, Granite City, Glen Carbon, Troy and the surrounding Metro East.
Quote my occupied stagingStaging since 2015 · RESA affiliated