Staging New Hampshire

Yesterday I worked on a vacant condo and as it turns out came up with an idea for props that I found very useful.  It may not be very original and you may have already thougt of it, but I'm excited to share the idea.

The condo is a restored older home and the kitchen has no upper cabinets.  The only lower cabinet is the one under the sink.  You know how useful that one is.

The good news is that there are two pantry closets which are very roomy.  I wanted to display one closet for dishes, small appliances and pans and the other closet for food storage.  Originally, the plan was to pick up some canned goods and boxes of cereal for the closet.  While packing my Jeep in preparation for the job, I went to add some paper to my recycling and it hit me...

I pulled out several cereal boxes, a tea box, a coffee can and brought them with me to the condo.  They were so easy and light to transport, look great in the pantry, and who cares if I ever get them back!  Now, this may not be something you need for every staging job, but it sure comes in handy for a vacant with questionable storage space.

This whole experience reminded me of when I created a "store" for my young children to play with using empty food containers.  I had family members saving all their empties for me.  My mother, sister and even grandmother became experts at opening  cans from the bottom so when placed on the "store" shelf they still looked unopened.  We were all very careful with labels and packaging. I even put polyfil in flour and sugar bags.  We had every kind of product imaginable.  It was quite the competition, each of us wanting to come up with the most original items.  I actually got quite excited when someone would drop off their collection of groceries for our store.  The kids loved when new inventory would arrive and they could put it away. The kids had a little cash register and loved playing in their store.  I ended up donating all the pretend food to a pre-school when my children out grew it. 

I look forward to playing "store" again someday, with grandchildren....until then I'll just have to keep playing with my staging props in other people's houses.