House Painting Tips Before Selling

Should You Paint Your House Before Selling?

Deciding to sell your home can be a big decision, especially if there are a few maintenance items that need to be completed – like painting the house. A freshly painted home can have a lot of curb appeal inside and out. Having any new exterior painting or interior painting done can be a factor in how long your home stays on the market or how much you can list the home. You are not alone if you ask the question: “Should we paint the house before selling?”

Reasons to Paint Before Selling

When listing your home for sale, it is common for realtors to recommend a homeowner put a fresh coat of paint on the home and in the home before an open house or showing. There are a few reasons to repaint:

1. Uniform Appearance. The son’s room is blue. The daughter’s room is pink. The kitchen is yellow and every other room has a theme. Over the years, everyone wants to put their own design in the home and customize different rooms with different colors. While this is a great and satisfying thing to do with your home, it could make it more difficult to sell on the market. Therefore, a fresh interior and exterior paint can make the house more uniform and appealing.
2. Home Will Look Newer. It is amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do to a room. If you don’t want to repaint the kid’s room, consider some of the main gathering areas; kitchen, kitchen cabinets, living room, dining room, halls, entry.
3. Inspire Vision. Whether your realtor is staging, or you’re using your own furniture, you want the homebuyer to envision their lives in that space. Utilizing fresh neutral colors can help trigger those visions in the homebuyer. Since we are emotional beings, having furniture and other objects in the right places along with utilizing certain colors can encourage the right emotions and visions.

Painting to Sell

Before you embark on running to the store to buy paint or hiring a professional house painter, here are a few points to consider:

1. Stay Neutral. As we stated earlier, a homeowner may like various color schemes and textures throughout the home, but it’s likely a new homebuyer may have different tastes. We highly recommend keeping things neutral – neutral colors and textures to help with resale.
2. Use A Consultant If Undecided. It is not uncommon for a house painter to walk into a home and see multiple color samples on the walls and asked: “Which one do you like?” With thousands of color options, we can understand deciding on the color can be a little challenging. Most paint stores offer or have contact information for Color Consultants. We know that Sherwin-Williams and PPG stores offer color consultants for a small fee. The consultants are professionals and can help you decide which direction to go. If you use Legacy Painting for your painting project, we offer color consultations through Sherwin-Williams or PPG at no additional charge.
3. If You Can Afford It, Hire A Painter. There are many benefits to hiring a professional painter for interior or exterior painting. Not only will the finished product look much better, but meeting a deadline to have the project completion is much more possible as long as you give the painter at least a few weeks notice. If a painter can start tomorrow, that’s a potential red flag. Good painters tend to be a few weeks or several weeks out. Also, if you have a hard deadline, they will generally do what they can to work with you on a suitable timetable.
4. At Least 2 Coats is Best. If you want a paint job to look good, always use at least 2 coats of paint. In some cases when covering a dark color with a light/neutral color, more than 2 coats will be needed. Unless you’re applying the same paint color, using 1 coat will generally not cover well enough.
5. Let Paint Dry and Open The Windows. Sometimes the smell of paint can be too much for a homebuyer. Aside from the obvious reason of allowing the paint to dry before touching or hanging anything on the walls, allow a couple days for the paint to dry and air out the paint fumes.

Consider Legacy Painting

At Legacy Painting, we take pride in our work. If you are looking for Indianapolis Painters or painters in the Central Indiana area, and ready to put your house on the market with a new coat of paint, consider Legacy Painting. We will work with on the scheduling and help you prepare your home for a new buyer.

Call (317) 426-7228