My dresser would have to go. Leave two dressers in a master bedroom and a potential buyer might suspect the closets are small.

Spoiler alert: They are small.

That wouldn’t be the only change I’d have to make if I put my house on the market and opened it up to a parade of strangers. My new bedspread, the one I bought after a year of searching for the perfect midcentury look, wouldn’t cut it, either. Instead, my bedroom was apparently begging for a fluffy white duvet with plenty of throw pillows. Throw pillows, you see, are key to selling a house. They should be big, bold and abundant, or so I’ve been told.

I’d invited my real estate broker over to help me decide whether I should sell my house and buy a larger one. As she toured my home, telling me what would need to be done to make it more appealing to potential buyers, I began to see that readying a house for sale is not unlike decorating a stage for a play, and perhaps just as hard. Consider these two basic rules of home staging.

One: Your house should not appear to be lived in by real people who own stuff.

Two: Buyers, who by their very nature apparently lack imagination, are wowed by “greige,” a color neither gray nor beige, but one where personal flair goes to die. (In other words, paint all your walls a pale shade of greige.)