Staging: Floral Decor On the Cheap

One thing that I like to use when staging empty houses is plants. Now of course you can't use real plants because no one is around to water them, but a really good fake plant can do a lot to cozy up a space. Of course home owners don't want to spend a lot of money on things they are going to leave behind and really real looking fake plants can cost a small fortune.
My solution to this conundrum is to make your own fake plants from things you find at the Dollar store. For example, I found a sprig of lovely fake orchids at my local Dollar Tree. The only problem with them was that the person who had designed this fake flower had obviously never looked closely at a real orchid. The flowers looked pretty real, but they were arranged in the standard six stem fake flower grouping, and they had way too many leaves and leaves half way up the stems. My solution was to bring the sprig home, cut off half of the stems and half of the leaves, to bend over one stem and hot glue the extra flowers onto it so that it looked like that bent over, heavily flowering stem that real orchids produce, and then to shove all of the remaining leaves to the bottom of the plant where they belonged. I then "planted" my new orchid in a pot of Spanish moss and tied it to a stick I found in my backyard because real orchids always seem to need to be tied up, and this is the sort of detail that makes a fake plant a really good fake vs. a cheap fake looking fake. The key here is simply to look at some real plants and then mimic them as closely as possible.

Plant, pot, and moss: $3 from the Dollar Tree



At Target: $20 on sale! (and my pot is way prettier)