Home stagers decorate a house in hours. Here are their tips for yours

A completed staged living room in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Rather than appealing to the specific tastes of one client, home stagers must make a space as enticing to as many people as possible. Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post

At 12:30 p.m. on a Monday, a rowhouse on a leafy street in Northeast Washington is completely empty. Less than five hours later, the three-bedroom residence brims with furniture, art and the kinds of baubles that make a house feel like a home: neatly folded hand towels in the bathroom, a dinosaur-shaped planter in the kids’ bedroom, an open backgammon board on the family room table.

What happened in between? Michelle DeLucia, owner of Sub Urban Staging and Design, came from a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Silver Spring, Maryland, wit