So, yeah, this is a great house.

But - how shall we put this? - people live there. Have since 1948. This family since 1992. They have stuff. Lots of stuff in all the little crannies. And, heaven he lp them, they want to sell. Because real estate is what it is, they have "a four-week window" to get it done so they can get their next great house.

They make the deal to buy a new one on a Saturday.

That very minute, the old house has to stop being their home. Or so Jim and Cathie Slaughter tell each other.

It's their investment now.

Which is hard if you had your only child there, and every room holds a memory.

Monday. They're talking to Michael Salas, a Coldwell Banker realtor, and he says, "Have you ever thought about staging?"

Jim and Cathie, being open-minded people, say: "What is staging?" Many home sellers paint the walls or tidy up. Home staging goes far beyond, revamping rooms and sometimes entire homes, inside and out, to highlight the best features of the home. It's more than just redecorating.

It's crawling into the head of the potential homebuyer and then clearing enough spaces so that they can see themselves and their possessions there. It is also the process of leaving/putting/rearranging enough of the right stuff in the house to ensure potential buyers that this house will welcome their lives into it.

Salas shows them some before-and-after photos of properties. He cites an oft-quoted National Association of Realtors line: In 1999, a California broker named Joy Valentine surveyed 2,772 homes in eight of the state's cities. She found that the average time on the market for staged homes was 13.9 days, while the average time on the market for nonstaged homes was 31 days.

Hot diggity, the Slaughters say.

Salas goes on. It seems sale prices for the nonstaged homes averaged 1.6 percent higher than list; staged homes sold at an average of 6.32 percent over list. For a home valued at $500,000, that would make a $31,600 difference. The Slaughters want $749,000 for their house. They think they are already pushing the upper limit of the price ceiling.

Cathie reminds Jim about the time they were shopping for a house, and they came upon this charmer, but once inside, found hundreds of teddy bears perched everywhere. "I couldn't see past them," she said.

She and Jim say yes to staging, even though they have no stuffed-animal collection to hide.

"We thought of a stager," Cathie says, "as a personal trainer for our home."

Two days later, Lane Burton looks around the house. Burton has "staged" a lot of vacant homes. Buyers buy out of emotion, and empty walls evoke little of it. So he's brought in furniture and accessories, magazines and flowers and made the buying public believe in the house's potential.

This, like we said, is a house that is completely and totally occupied. It is the kind of house that nobody thinks needs a stager.

Burton begs to differ. He is gentle. He is complimentary. But, let's face it, he can say things to the owner that the Realtor can't.

Like? The front entrance needs verve. (Take up the grass, put down flagstone, put down coconut mulch.) The front door needs definition. (Paint, move plants.) The hallway is wasted. (Fix that.) The master bedroom needs to be rearranged. (Make a seating area, make more walking space between pieces.) The kitchen needs to be decluttered. (Take away appliances, stow the plethora of spices, hide stacks of dishes, bring out the extensive pottery collection.) The flowerbeds need fresh buds (check), and the yard furniture could use some sprucing (check, check). Let's clean those carpets, let's power-wash the exterior, let's make the closet look like the racks at The Gap.

Three days after the initial consult, Burton stands in the master bedroom, directing the Slaughters and two burly men what to carry out, what to throw out, what to keep, what to store, what to give away, what to move, what to "merchandise."

He's created a Throw Out pile, a Goodwill pile, a Storage pile and a Haggle-with-the-6-year-old-over pile.

Jim Slaughter, Newport Beach, Calif. lawyer, is still in his suit and piling on piles. The old shutters, the mildewed cooler, the dry Play-Doh in the Throw Out pile. The R25 attic insulation blanket and the patio furniture in the Goodwill pile. A few beautiful antiques, some lamps and the family photos go in storage. (You want the buyers to look at the architecture of the house, not the photographs.)

"I'm looking at this like a premove. We have to do it anyway," he says. "By the way, have you seen my Man Room?"

Seems Burton told Jim, a winemaker, to fix up the shed.

Jim, so pleased with the effect he's created, is thinking about a second career.

"I put out the Arnold copy of the Cigar (Aficionado) magazine," says Jim, "just to be topical. You know, they say to start every presentation with a current event."

Staging has probably existed since the first caves were traded but, as a recognized art, it dates to 1976, when an interior designer started helping Realtors do their jobs in very high-end properties in suburban Seattle. The term "staging" was adopted a decade later, and now there are even accredited staging professionals across the country.

In Orange County, Calif., where we have lots of experience with model-home stagers, there has been remarkably little formal staging work in preowned homes, especially in those whose price tag is less than a few million.

Next working day. Burton is searching high and low for coffee-table books. He's grouping things in threes and fives. He is searching for symmetry with objects. He found a credenza in the garage and has put it in a bedroom. He's turning the plants to find "their good side."

The master bedroom, he advises, is "the money room." That is, it's the room most women want to fall in love with. Pay a lot of attention to how that looks. Less is more. You want everything to look bigger. This is the psychological game that's at work here, says Burton. "If people see no clutter, they believe that, 'Look, honey, we'll have no clutter if we live here.'"

They see lawn chairs and a table, with a sun umbrella and a little raft of drinks on the side, and, "They think, 'If I move here, look how relaxed I'll be.'"

Staging, he emphasizes, is not to hide the property's faults. It is to let the house sell itself.

The Slaughters are doing as they're told. They are only afraid they will pack something away they will need. They are noting that "function has gone out the window." This is about form.

The Slaughters have made it easy. It is not always so.

"Every property is different," Burton says. "It's kind of like dating a schizophrenic woman. You walk in the room, and you never know what you're going to get."

Burton works steadily for several hours, dipping occasionally into his toolbox. (What's in it? Felts, for the bottom of chairs and table legs; wall-hanging materials, for that art he'd like to rearrange; wood touch-up for furniture because scuffs are so scuffy; a stud finder, because you never know when you need one; tape because it's so useful; and, paper boot covers so he doesn't mess up the carpet-cleaning triumph.)

At the end of the day, Cathie looks at her newly rearranged house and asks why they didn't do this before.

Burton tells the story of a colleague who staged a house for sale only to have the sellers decide they liked it so much, they took the house off the market.

The argument against staging is that it costs money when money is already flying out the window. For that reason, some Realtors actually pick up the tab.

Not so in this case. For Burton's services at the Slaughters' house, the bill comes to $2,200. He gets $125 an hour to consult, with burly guys thrown in. He charges for the rental of furniture, the live-plant service, any original art he's leased from area galleries, and then he tacks on anything he's done to fill in your gaps. You pay for the storage of your stuff.

In the case of the Slaughters, he added only the one chair to the house and the teak steamer chairs to the front yard. He planted $50 worth of vegetables and herbs in the garden out back.

One week after the big ransacking, and four days after the big rearranging, the house in the fashionable east side of Costa Mesa, Calif. is ready to be shown to a parade of brokers. The verdict is overwhelmingly positive. "Cute," they say. "Charming." "I have someone in mind." "Can I bring someone over in a half-hour?" "It shows so well."

By the end of the day of the broker showing, the house has been shown to seven clients.

By the end of the next day, there are two offers for the Slaughters to consider.

There is some negotiation, contingencies to consider. A third offer comes in a few days later. The buyer has already put money on another house. But he saw this house and that was that. The Slaughters have closed their "four-week window of opportunity" in 10 days, and they got the full asking price.

The Slaughters believe the whole thing was not only worth it, in terms of dollars, but absolutely invaluable, given their busy lives. In fact, Jim says, it might even be worth it, even if you aren't selling. "It's almost like a low-cost remodel."

Lane Burton moved on as soon as he was done, before the Slaughters sold. He had to go back only to pick up his steamer chairs. By then, he was deep into fixing what was wrong with a multimillion-dollar house on the ocean. Which needed everything but a view.