Bellevue, TN

At Showhomes, we stage all types of homes. Some are amazing, beautiful homes that look stunning when staged and some are, ummm - more challenging?

We strive to make every home we stage look amazing. Some just take more work. At our training class last week in Nashville we deconstructed an already staged home and spent a day putting it back together:

This $800k hilltop tudor home was built about 20 years ago. The home has amazing views and state of the art fixtures for its age. Here's the main room our class had to work with and as you can see, it's a bit of sage overload:

The carpet and walls are green. The light fixtures are green. When this room is empty, it is just plain green! How do you tone down the mono-chromatic colors? With the 2-story wall of windows, how do you use the fireplace? making it worse, the traffic pattern runs right through the middle of the room.

After moving couches and chairs all over the room, our class settled on what I think is the right way to stage this room:

They used the fireplace as the focal point, pulled the furniture off the walls, made it so everyone could reach the coffee table (a must for good conversation groups) and used the hearth as additional seating. The traffic pattern goes around the grouping, not through it and there are large accesories to make the room pop.

When you add in lamps and soften the lighting, the room isn't nearly as green. After staging the room, we noticed that everyone wanted to plop down on the couch or in a chair - the room went from cold and green to warm and comfortable.

Thomas Scott, Showhomes

www.showhomes.com

Franchise Information

For only $10 a month, you can now save your self a trip to the recycle centers to dump off all your recylables!  Just go to www.recyclenashville.com and sign up!  You can pay a little extra to have them pick up twice a month, for only $18.  You don't have to separate anything and you can just put it all in one bin!  What a steal!  Now you can save the environment and save some time!  It's a Win-Win!

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me!

I have had so many questions about this new tax credit that I thought I would share a website that has all the answers - http://www.federalhousingtaxcredit.com/2009/home2.html.

The bottom line as I read it is that you get 10% of the purchase price back as a tax refund with a max of $8,000, as long as you purchased your home between January 1, 2009 and December 1, 2009.  There is an income limit to get the full refund, but even if you exceed the max income you can still get a percentage of the credit.  You can even file it on your 2008 taxes and get the refund now.  You don't have to pay anything back, but the home does have to be your primary residence and you do have to live there for 36 months.  For further details check out the website above!  This is a great opportunity for many!

The Bellevue Center Mall has been sold to a California firm, Foursquare Properties, for $28 million dollars. Foursquare plans to transform the mall into an open-air lifestyle center with major retail anchors. There are plans are six restaurants and office and retail space to be developed. Macy's department store will remain at the site.