You have lived in your home for several years, but for one reason or another, it no longer fits your needs. You have now decided to sell it, and are looking for the most profitable sale possible. Whatever your reason for selling, you may wonder if you should paint your home before you put it on the market.
If you are preparing your home for a potential sale, you know that there are many things to consider before placing it on the market. You’ll want to decide which realtor to use, what your priorities are, and how soon you have to sell. It’s generally a good idea to work on the exterior of the home so that it is visually appealing to people passing by or coming to view the house. This is known as curb appeal, but you don’t want to stop there.
If you’re thinking of staging your home to make that lucrative sale, you’d also want to ensure that there aren’t any issues with the electricity and plumbing. The list goes on and on.
One thing you may want to consider is painting your house, at least the interiors, before enlisting it for sale. There are a variety of reasons why painting your interior is important when selling a house:
- Less work to do – If you paint the walls before you sell your home, potential buyers will see this as one less thing they have to do when they move in. If they have to paint after they move in, they may decide not to buy your house. You want to do whatever you can to make your home seem like an attractive investment.
- Fresh paint is noticed – You may have repainted last year or the year before, but living in a home means the walls will likely get handprints or scuff marks on them, particularly if your family has small children. Potential buyers notice when a home is freshly painted. Even if they change the color after the buy it, they like seeing newly painted walls and ceilings right after they move in
- Making it less personal – Even though you’ve chosen the color scheme for your home with a great deal of thought and planning, potential buyers may not have the same taste in colors as you have. The pale green that perfectly matches your couch and chairs may clash with their furniture. The purple accent wall may accentuate the artwork hung on the wall, but will it work with their artwork? These are things you need to consider when staging and selling your home. Once you decide to paint your home before staging it, you might want to opt for a more neutral color palette. This will make the potential buyers able to visualize their own personal effects inside the spaces more easily, making them more open to a final purchase.
- Keeping the rooms bright and light – Darker walls tend to make a room feel smaller than it might actually be. Since people buying homes often want to move into somewhere that is larger than their current home, it is advisable to paint walls white, off white, or in a light gray matte finish. These colors will make the rooms appear as large as possible.
- Staying natural – If you stay with neutral colors like white, pale gray, or off white, your home will have a “move-in ready” appeal to it. It might even give off the vibe of a brand new home that has hardly been lived in. Once your potential buyers can envision themselves in your home, you have a much greater chance of making a sale.
Tips for Painting a Home for Sale
- Don’t go pure white – You can use some color when painting your home before staging it. Of course, totally white walls throughout a home would be a little monotonous. Children’s bedrooms, bathrooms, and laundry rooms are places where you may use color, but you will want to use lighter, neutral shades like pale blue, tan, or even pale yellow. You could also choose to add a focal wall, which means having a wall of one color with the rest in a neutral shade. Potential buyers may decide they like the home well enough to buy it even if they do have to paint one wall.
- Consider the area – Colors for staging homes vary across the country. Whereas gray may be the perfect color in some areas, beige is also a crowd-pleaser that will work in many areas of the country. If you think that another shade will please the crowd more, you can take the plunge in that direction as well. It might be worthwhile to visit a few homes for sale yourself in order to see what’s in demand these days.
- Choose the right finish – You may want to experiment with colors and finishes while painting your home for staging, but it really is best to stick with a gloss-finish for trim and satin or eggshell finish for walls. After all, you’re not the one who’s going to live with these embellishments for too long. A satin finish means there’s a slight bit of gloss which makes cleaning easier. Since you most likely don’t want light to reflect from the ceiling, it is best to use flat paint on that surface.
- Swatches and more: Pain swatches are all very well when you decide to get some new paint for your home. If you want the best result, though, don’t just rely on those little dots of color on a white page. The lighting, shadows, and several other aspects of a room can affect how the color looks on its walls at the end of the day. To get the best possible color scheme, take some options home and view them in the intended room at different times during the day. Look at them under natural light, artificial light, and in as many situations as you can imagine. If you’ve seen some likely paint colors in certain other homes, don’t automatically think that they’d suit yours. Put them through the same testing period first.
- Choose specific areas: You may not want to repaint your entire home, and you might not have to make that investment. The walls may have been recently repainted, so check for those small areas where there are fingerprints or scuff marks. Check around the high traffic areas such as the hallways and stairwells that used the most. You will also want to check around light switches and make some changes there. Instead of repainting, you may be able to use a ‘Magic Eraser’ to clean the areas instead.
Also be sure to consider help from professionals like Hurry Curry Paint as well.
Conclusion
Deciding whether or not to paint your home for staging before putting it on the market is something your family will want to think about. Of course, there will be a cost for repainting, especially as you’ll need to get the paint as well as brushes and other tools. You could hire a professional painter, but that will double or triple the cost for painting. It will reduce the risk of making mistakes, so weight your choices before making a final decision. It is good to remember, however, that you can include the cost of repainting in the sale price to help you recoup the money spent on this task. You still don’t want to go overboard, though, so here’s how you can stage your home for less than $1000.