Melissa Marro, a Home Staging and Interior Redesign Specialist from Orange Park, FL has always had an obsession with decorating and redesign.  “Even as a teenager I had a strange obsession with it.  I would take my graph paper, measure all my furniture and my room and start making scale cutouts of everything trying to see which way it would fit best.  When that didn’t work, I would just move everything until I liked it!”  

Marrying young and having three children while her husband was in the Navy she had to learn how to decorate on a budget.  Moving 12 times in 14 years, quickly finding the correct placement for things and more importantly using what you already owned became very important to her.  “There just wasn’t money to spend on new things every time we moved.  I wanted the house to look nice, but didn’t really have a budget for much more than paint.”    

Moving also meant buying and selling homes, lots of them!  Always on a budget and looking out for the bottom line, the homes the Marro family bought were usually the plain or neglected house that could be bought for below market value but had good bones and potential.  The homes were then given great paint jobs, cleaned and staged to sell when the time came.  Every home she put on the market sold quickly and at top dollar.  She realized she had a knack for the job.   

With over 10 years experience Marro sold her Charleston, SC company, First Impressions and relocated to St Augustine, FL where she started over from scratch. Now living in Orange Park, FL, just outside of Jacksonville, she runs one of the biggest home staging companies in the US. With nearly $1M in annual revenue, she stages homes ranging from under $100,000 up to multi-million dollars. Each home is staged with care, paying attention to the demographics and architecture.