The Best Colours To Paint Your Rooms Before Selling Your House

Fetching a higher price for the sale of your home depends on several factors with the most important factor being its overall appearance.

We’ve all looked at houses that are up for sale and asked ourselves, “what were they thinking?”

It’s truly a wonder that some houses actually ever get sold and some stay on the market for months, and sometimes more than a year because they just didn’t take the time to make their home look presentable.

Well, there’s one way to really spice up your home before you sell it that won’t break the bank and will even let you raise the selling price a bit.

That’s giving it a proper interior paint job.

It’s all about appearance, especially the appearance of the inside of your home.

If you use the right colours for each room in your home, you’re bound to have a quicker sale but do the colours you paint your rooms matter?

They sure do.

So let’s get started. Read the following tips on the best colours to paint your rooms before you put in on the market for sale.

Let’s start with the best colours for the bedrooms

When selling your home you need to make sure that potential buyers viewing your bedrooms can get a comfortable sense of what it would be like to spend their nights in them.

When buying a home, no one wants to even think about having to repaint the bedrooms unless the rest of home has many other valuable attributes.

So which colour should you go with for painting at least one room? Cadet Blue. Cadet blue is known to make a room look perfectly neutral and doesn’t invoke thoughts of repainting the room.

Cadet blue is so perfectly neutral and clean that you can actually paint all your bedrooms with it and it’s been known to help a home seller fetch a higher price on their home sale. If you’re selling your house, don’t hesitate to give this colour a try.

The next best colour for your bedroom which will fetch you a pretty penny at your sale is light cerulean blue but this is a more classical colour scheme and I advise you stick with cadet blue to be safe rather than sorry.

Now onto the kitchen colours

Another important room in the home is the kitchen, and you don’t want potential home buyers being turned off by the colour of the walls. At the very same time, you also want to be able to sell your home to at the highest price, and that can be done by painting your kitchen blue too.

Not cadet blue, because you definitely don’t want your kitchen to be the same colour as your bedrooms, and not black, nor purple, nor red, nor orange, nor beige and definitely not brown.

Selecting the right paint color is one of many factors that may affect why a home sells faster or for more money. Walls painted in cool neutrals like blue or gray have broad appeal, and may be signals that the home is well cared for or has other desirable features. [Source]

So according to Zillow, the colour that will net you the highest sale price for your home are cool neutral colours like blue or grey, however, I can say without a doubt that there are exceptions to the rule. White and dark grey, or white and black can also make a kitchen look amazingly attractive.

There are some exceptions to the rule however, when it comes to painting the kitchen, with one of them being the colour of your existing cabinets and floor tiles. If they simply don’t match your idea of painting your kitchen a cool blue or solid white, then you may have a problem.

In such cases, the best bet for fetching the highest sale of your home, you need to do some colour matching, brainstorming, and envision which colours will go good with them. Keep in mind that even if your kitchen walls are painted with a complimenting colour to your cabinets and floors, there may be an opportunity to paint the walls a different hue or shade.

Lets look at the bathroom colours

After you’ve lived in your home for a long time, somewhere down the line you may have decided to go crazy and paint your bathroom an eccentric colour like bright yellow, dark purple, black or any unorthodox colour. It happens to long-time home owners all the time. The problem is that new home buyers don’t particularly like the extreme colours and as soon as they see a bathroom painted in such a way, it stands out, and the impression is usually not a good one.

Interestingly enough, recent research once again suggests that light blues are the best colours the paint a bathroom before selling a home, and statistics show that a home with a blue-painted bathroom will sell for $5440 over the asking price. That’s a lot of money, and a bold statement, but you have to consider all your options first, namely:

• did you or are you painting your bedrooms blue?
• did you or are you painting your kitchen blue?

If you answered yes to the above, then you should consider painting your bathroom a cool grey or light beige. If you answered yes to the above, but still want to go blue, you can easily do so by choosing a hue of blue that doesn’t exactly match the other walls in your home. If you answered no because you choose other colours for your kitchen and bedrooms, then a light neutral blue is the perfect choice.

Then there’s the living room

HGTV published an article that shows you all the colours to paint every part of your home before selling it and they say the best colour for the living room are warm brown colours. The problem is that HGTV isn’t a home selling company, they’re a home improvement company. So can their synopsis be trusted?

Well there’s Zillow, which once again substantiates that claim and says the best colours for the living room when it comes to selling are brown, light beige, pale taupe, or oatmeal which will help you fetch more than $1,809 over the asking price.

They also suggest that blue, pastel grey, pale silver, light blue or periwinkle blue will cause you lose an average of $820 on the sale price of your home.

What if I can’t figure out all these colours myself?

If you can do it alone, you shouldn’t. Your ultimate goal is to get the top dollar when selling your home so if you are having problems figuring colours out, don’t go it alone.

Simply hire a local interior designer or home stager for painting advice. For a meagre price of around $500 a home stager or interior designer would be more than happy to give you colour advice, and their suggestions will be based on experience.

Some homes are laid out in ways that don’t make colour-matching easy, while other homes force you to paint 2 rooms the same colour (e.g. a kitchen that is connected to and open to a living room) (see above image).

In cases like these a decorator or stager will be able to give you the best advice and tips for getting the colours right and how to enhance the sale price of your home without breaking the bank.

Points to consider when painting your home for the highest sale

Remember that when it comes to selling your home nothing is static. Things change and before you make any painting decisions keep in mind that every house is different. Different layouts and sizes could mean that you have to go against the grain of good advice and try other colours.

The main idea is to keep the colours looking cool, neutral, welcoming and warm. Homes painted in these types of colours and shades do sell for more and give the potential home buyer not only a warm and welcoming feeling, but also makes them feel that they don’t have to paint the whole house after they buy it.

That factor alone helps you sell your home quicker, and so your objective to get the most out of your asking price.