Call it staging, call it redesign, call it taking your passion and making it your business.

At least three Wyoming women - Jennifer Beevers in Casper and Cindy Sober and Sally Oban in Douglas - are pioneers in the growing home staging, redesign business - at least in these parts.

There are two components to staging. The first is decluttering and depersonalizing an occupied home to prep it for sale.

"You're selling your home, not your personal belongings," Beevers said.

Beevers, owner of Casper Home Staging, has been in business for just three months but started with a wow when she staged two of the nine new construction homes in the recent Parade of Homes, sponsored by the Casper Star-Tribune.

That's the second component of staging - furnishing a new construction home just to the point where prospective buyers can see the possibilities without a lot of clutter.

"The Drapers [owners of Draper Construction] are my neighbors and so I offered to do that one," she said, "and then I just started calling other builders, and Rocky and Lisa Eades let me do theirs, too."

The result in the Eades Construction home on East 24th Street was stunning - large, traditional black leather furniture enhanced the open living area and a magnificent bedroom set captivated the main floor master suite.

In the library just off the foyer, Beevers wanted "old, colorfully bound hardback books," for the built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace.

"I went to the Friends of the Library, and they gave me old books from the book sale," she said, adding, "I'm willing to go anywhere or use anything to get the right effect."

Beevers added her own accessories to the exquisite granite master bathroom, her lamps graced the living room and she chose the bedding ensemble in the master bedroom.

Lisa Eades, wife of contractor Rocky Eades, had already arranged to use Flanigan's Furniture and the Flower Gallery fresh flower and accessory inventory for the Parade of Homes, but Beevers coordinated it and plugged the holes.

Beevers estimates she spent about 60 hours preparing the home for the Parade of Homes.

"To her credit, she took a lot of things Flanigan's and Flower Gallery brought and just really pulled it together," said Lisa Eades. "She has a really good eye for fluffing and what should go where."

Eades Construction builds both pre-sold and "spec" homes, meaning they are not purchased prior to building. That is the case with the East 24th Street home, which is on the market for $900,000.

"With 500-some homes on the market, in my mind, staging a home is what could give somebody that edge," Lisa Eades said.

She said aside from looking great, staging serves a real practical purpose for contractors.

"It allows people to get a better feel for the volume of the rooms and what you can put in them," she said. "Square footage doesn't change from hole digging to finish, but at each stage of construction, the feel of the rooms gets bigger and with furniture in there, the rooms look even bigger than they thought they'd be."

Whimsy is perhaps the best way to describe Beevers' decision to enter the business.

"My husband, Kris, and I were in the Las Vegas airport and I read in Entrepreneur magazine that home staging is one of the top 10 most successful businesses in the U.S. right now," she said. "We looked at each other and said, 'Why not?'"

Generally, stagers are paid by those wanting to sell their home or by real estate agents. In order to get their house ready for the market, sellers may pay a one-time consultation fee and do the work a stager suggests themselves; or pay for the stager to implement the recommended decluttering and depersonalizing steps.

Beevers said in larger markets, realtors often make staging part of their pitch to potential clients and pay for the services as part of the package.

She says she has invested "thousands and thousands" of dollars in inventory already, and hopes local retailers soon understand what Flanigan's and Flower Gallery already have - that loaning their inventory to use for home staging gives them great exposure.

"So far, [some] retailers don't see how it could benefit them," Beevers said. "They want to know what they are going to get out of it."

Beevers is intent on growing her business and says she's in it for the long haul. A stay-at-home mom, she said explaining staging to real estate agents and how it can benefit their clients is her next large challenge.

"The whole idea of staging is to highlight the best features of the home and make it more appealing to a wider range of buyers," Beevers said. "I need to show them I can be as much of a service to them as they can be to me," she said.

In Douglas, Sober and Oban have worked as Roomers Redesign since January. They specialize in staging occupied homes to put on the real estate market and redesigning rooms to fit the homeowners' needs. They also have backgrounds in visual merchandising and interior design.

"We felt there was a real interest in redesigning from friends and acquaintances, and designers just aren't easily accessible here," Sober said.

Like Beevers, Oban describes staging as preparing a home to sell, making it more of a neutral space that anybody can see themselves living in.

Redesign, on the other hand, is "using your things to make your space functional and beautiful," Oban said.

The pair have done both staging of existing homes and redesign since January, but unlike Beevers, have yet to venture into staging new construction for contractors.

"New construction is just starting here," Oban said, "but we have been talking to people about that."

While home staging has been around nationally and in Canada for just a couple of decades, it's just now making its way to central Wyoming.

"We do kind of feel like pioneers," Oban said, "but people are really excited about what we are doing."

"If we can use what they have, it makes it much easier," Sober said, "but we have brought in stuff we own. We just try to network and put all the pieces together."

Reach community news editor Sally Ann Shurmur at (307) 266-0520 or sallyann.shurmur@trib.com

Why stage?

"The way you live in your home, and the way you market and sell your home, are two different things."

- Barb Schwarz, creator of Home Staging

Average Days on Market Before Sold

* Nonstaged homes: 171.2 days

* ASP (Accredited Staging Professional) homes: 33.6 days

Source: stagedhomes.com

For more info

To contact Casper Home Staging, call (307) 333-2852

To contact Roomers Redesign, call (307) 358-6022 or (307) 358-6142