Today’s post is a proverbial tip of the cap to #8 Yogi Berra.  Writers write what they know about, and regular readers know I love baseball.

Have had this analogy in my mind for months, planning to run it for Yogi’s birthday in May. Today instead I join legions of heavy-hearted baseball fans saying thank you for the memories.

Analogies can connect the dots, making the seemingly irrelevant relevant. And in my experience, the more incongruous the comparison, the better.

So while baseball has nothing to do directly with design or listing prep, after a career in this business I can tell you nothing rings truer about the process than this Yogi-ism. Home staging and design work is truly 90% mental, the other half physical.

OF COURSE  design and home staging work is about aesthetics. But it’s a fatal error to consider them to just about a pleasing aesthetic, or hitting a budget.

There are a lot of unknowns in the design and listing prep process. Another favorite Yogi-ism comes to mind-“If you don’t know where you’re going, you may wind up someplace else”.  Ignore that 90%, that mental game at great risk of ending up someplace else.

The Refreshed Home knows success follows when early on you consider the people and the process as much as the things. Minimizing client concerns can easily delay or derail a project.

• In design, that could mean delayed decisions that hold up trades, or impulsive decisions.
• In real estate canceled showings, unkempt spaces, and pulling out of deals at the 11th hour.

Hiring design or home staging professionals is not an everyday thing, and it’s a pretty unique process for both sides.  Having a definition to shape the experience is a good starting point. Mine is simple and precise, universal and open-ended:

Design and home staging work is whatever you do to improve a property and ease your mind. 

Picking the right color of paint, and knowing where to put the furniture is the easy half of the game. It’s that 90%, that mental part of the game where The Refreshed Home shines.

Staying and improving? Moving into a new space? Planning to list?  We help untangle that awkward relationship most people have with their space and their things, as well as their time, money, their hopes and their dreams. Interested or curious? Just start the conversation!

   Thanks Yogi. You were one of a kind, and will be missed terribly.