As with the previous Edition – The Dining Room, I was given the challenge of staging the Kitchen as if it was going to appear on a set of Estate Agents details. The parameters of the challenge are:

15 Minutes – Use anything you can find in the house – Spend zero money.

T – Minus 15 Minutes and Counting……

Your Kitchen can have 25 cupboards and a dishwasher that lights up “Put The Dishes In Here”, but if you have a teenager in the house they all might as well be invisible. Time to turn it in to a blank canvass.

T – Minus 5 Minutes and Counting……

Time to polish all the work surfaces and titles, to get it to really shine I would have used car polish, but I’d used it all on the car! Added extra sheen to the sink, cooker, cooker hood all the handles, fridge and dishwasher with a duster and a bit of baby oil (great for brushed steel too).

T – Plus 20 Minutes and Counting……

Arrrgh ! The time limit has gone already ! Just about to start staging and the ‘Teenager’ walks in and starts cooking, I gently sob in the corner.

T – Plus 25 Minutes and Counting……

I stopped the clock during the cooking session, cleaned up again and started to move the objects back in.

T – Plus 29 Minutes and Counting……

Stop The Clock …. 44 Minutes …..

OK. So I didn’t manage it in the timescale, but I did it for Zero ! Normally when an Estate Agent takes photos of a kitchen it is just one angle, by putting other objects around the room it will encourage them to take multiple pictures at different angles – for instance on the left hand side there are a range of illuminated glass cupboards which cant be seen from this photo.

 

Top Tips:

Declutter

Start with a blank canvass

Illuminate (turn the lights on)

Dress the room accordingly

Remove back ground objects that distract from the room

Have some fun (be subtle or go crazy, just remember your audience are potential purchasers)

Stuck for ideas? There are hundreds of thousands of ideas by room on the web, but I recommend just giving it a try first. After all you just never know what you’ll come up with!