Painting the exterior of your house
A home’s exterior plays a large part in how the world, or at least neighbours and visitors, see you. It is also the first thing potential buyers will see, and the first impression is often a lasting one. Below are some great tips on updating your house exterior from styleathome.com.
- Consider updating your home with a fresh coat of paint every three to six years. If preparing your home for sale, use an appealing neutral colour.
- If you want to invigorate your home’s exterior without painting the entire exterior, freshen up the trim. White or rich neutrals, depending on the house’s exterior colour, can easily update the look of your house.
- Paint your front door a statement colour that stands out from the rest of the house. Try a gorgeous historical blue or a radiant ruby red – not something you see every day.
- Shutters and porch gables are the perfect place to express a love for colour and decorate with paint.
Staging with paint
Changing paint colors is one of the easiest (and cheapest!) ways to make your home look better and actually increase its value. Below you will find some tips on how to use paint when preparing your home for sale. Source: www.stagemyownhome.com
- Limit your interior colors for home staging to earth tones and neutrals. Neutral wall tones create excellent backdrops for the color you are going to add later during the final staging, with furniture, draperies, artwork, and accessories. Added color will simply “pop” against a neutral canvas.
- Examples of interior colors for home staging that most people love: beige, taupe, ivory, coffee tones, honey, butter, golden, wheat, blue-green, mossy green, brown, blue-gray, and gray. Gray is a sophisticated color and very trendy at this time. Gray complements all other colors and serves as an excellent backdrop for brighter colors, allowing them to shine.
- Light neutrals and earth tones have the widest appeal among home buyers and will complement most people’s furniture.
- An easy way to create color flow is to use lighter and darker shades of the same color throughout your home. A fan deck or paint color swatch from any home improvement store can help you select interior colors for home staging. The great thing about paint sample strips is that they take a lot of guess work out of choosing paint colors, as they contain one color in several different shades.
- To expand visually a space (or hide ugly moldings), use the same light color on walls, baseboards and trim work. Doing so will cause unattractive features to recede, or seemingly blend into the walls Minimize the length of a long narrow room by painting the long walls a light color and the end walls in a darker warm shade of the same color. Because darker colors advance, this gives the effect of “squaring” the room.
- For over-sized rooms, use a combination of warm and darker colors. The dark colors will make the room seem cozier and more intimate.
- Visually lift a low ceiling by painting it white or a light pastel hue.