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in reply to cindeelean #Juan is our Mover/Installer, and he is One Two Six Design’s very first employee. We celebrated his birthday at the end of Jan, and on March 15th, we’ll be celebrating again — his 10 year anniversary with the company!!
Star Employee Juan (left) Celebrating His 31st Birthday
In his 10 year tenure, Juan has helped staged well over 3000 homes all around the Bay Area; He knows the every short cut and back road from Peninsula to East Bay and can point out homes he help staged at almost every intersection. Juan has an amazing memory and is the master of our warehouse, he knows exactly where to find anything, and can pull out any specific painting from our collection of ~1000 prints stored along the 120′ long wall!
Juan’s experience is a huge help to our business, he remembers which painting looks well with the furniture the designers picked and can literally stage a home all by himself! It is hard to find anyone who works harder than Juan. He is always punctual, always upbeat, and always pays attention to safety and details. Juan and the rest of our team of designers and installers are the soul of our company, they are One Two Six Design, they are the reason why we are still around after 10 years!
Thank you Juan for you hard work and dedications!
The evidence of our latest purchases
As mentioned in the previous post, we are constantly out shopping for arts, accessories, bedding, etc. No we are not shopaholics, we simply believe in investing in our inventories, keep our stuff updated and in-trend. We want our clients to get what they’ve paid for, and give the home buyers a fresh feeling when they walk in homes we staged.
Anyways, here are the packing boxes from our latest purchase pilling in our back parking lot…
)More good news from our realtor clients, actually, we prefer to call them “partners” since we are working toward the same goal — to help home owners sell.
We recently staged a lovely 1300 sq ft condo a block away from downtown Mountain View. In less than a week, our partner called us to de-stage, yup, the place is sold!! Granted, the condo is located at a prime location, great looking boutique complex, functional layout and nicely remodeled. It is still amazing to hear how fast it was able to sell!
Mountain View Condo (Sold in 1 Week!)
On the other hand, last Tues we did a partial staging for a townhouse in East Bay. This was a challenging project. The townhouse was covered in floral patterned wallpapers dated from the 70’s, the owner also had a lot of heavy, bulky, solid wood furniture and a set of bright red leather sofa. To make it more difficult, the owner run out of storage space, so besides the bright lipstick red leather sofas, everything else had to stay… Well, we re-arranged the existing furnishings, brought in a set of lighter neutral colored sofa, art works and accessories to tie everything together… Again, we were very pleased to hear from our Realtor partner over the weekend that the place is pending!!
We love it when agents call to tell us their listings we staged is pending! What’s even better is when they call us shortly after we stage the properties!! It is a great feeling knowing that we were part of a successful selling experience for the sellers!
Recent sold under 30 days:
What could be better if you ask? Sold over listing price that is!!
One of the coolest thing about what we do is that we get to unwrap “presents” all the time, year round! We are constantly looking and shopping for that perfect ornament, bedding and furnishings to add to our already vast inventory. It is always like Christmas here at our warehouse.
We got it for its simplicity, its clean lines and its neutral color. Can't wait to use it!
We have numerous gorgeous looking white sofa sets that we haven’t used in awhile, simply because it is a bit dirty on the arms and cushions due to the moving and handling. Like most of our furniture, these sofas were custom made by Calico Corners and costed us thousands of dollars each, it would be a shame to throw in the towel on them.
In the effort to give these sofas a new life, I called up numerous upholstery cleaners to see if there is anything they can do to revamp the fabric. I eventually picked Chuck from Ameripro Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning due to his great customer ratings on Yelp. Chuck flat out told us not to waste money on trying to clean the sofas, reason being the fabric were pure cotton, while it looks fabulous and great to the touch, they are very hard to clean. Chuck specifically pointed out the few water stains result of our workers attempts to clean the fabric with off-the-shelf upholstery cleaners, and said that cotton does a great job soaking up the stains, and it would be impossible for him to renew the fabric for our staging purposes.
Lesson learned here, although we love the look and feel of cotton, we have to keep in mind that it is a material that’s harder to maintain when compared to other fabrics with mixed cotton and synthetic materials or microfiber. For those of you shopping for that perfect family couch, hope what we learned can help you with your purchase decision.
What’s going to happen to these sofas we have? well, they won’t be used for staging anymore, but we’ll try to find new homes for them by either sell them or donate them to families in need…
