If you are thinking about selling your house, you have a long list of things you need to do. But, one thing that might be on the “maybe” list is the paint. Is it a good idea to paint a house before selling it? Or is this just a waste of time? Below we will be discussing this. But it should be noted in general that painting the inside and outside of a home IS beneficial. It can lead to really great results in terms of people wanting to buy the house, but it can also lead to a return on your investment. We will also be discussing that below as well. If you live in New Jersey and you want to paint your home prior to selling it you should contact a residential painter in Summit. Summit interior painters are skilled at house painting and can make your home more appealing to potential buyers.
Painting The Exterior
To be honest if you are going to choose the outside vs. the inside, the outside is going to be the most beneficial. Remember that saying, the first impression is the last impression? Well that’s very true in this case. If you have potential buyers driving up to your house and the paint is old, cracked, peeling, falling off, or it’s some god awful color from the 70s, chances are it’s going to leave those buyers thinking and assuming the inside is just as bad as the outside. This doesn’t mean you have to get all fancy and buy some expensive paint for the scheme. But, it should be updated in the least to prepare the buyers from what is in store for them on the inside. Instead of choosing bold colors, which might be popular right now, choose neutral colors so that the potential buyer doesn’t have to redo it in the next few years which believe me, is something they will be thinking about if you paint it some bold bright color. They might even ask for a reduction in the price because they want to change the color scheme. Neutral is the best and the safest scheme to go with.
Paint The Inside
Of course making a good impression with the outside is important, but the inside is as important as well. If you have clean walls and the paint is not peeling or cracked, you can probably get away with “as is” presentations. If you have a few spots of dirt – get yourself a sponge and use some warm water to get the spots off. You can also use those bleach sponges to get rid of marks and you can use small amounts of paint on a roller in smaller marked instances to paint over and it looks just like new. Besides the paint, make sure you are cleaning the edges of the walls, the corners, the chair rails, trim and everything else. Again, good color schemes for inside the home are going to be neutral colors. White, though used a lot in apartments and houses, is very boring and plain. Too bold or bright and they might not like it. But, neutral colors sort of sets the mood to let them wrap their imagination around the interior of the house and imagine how they would set it up, where they would put their furniture, how they would accessorize, etc. Neutral colors are also great because they depersonalize the property – its not yours any longer. It’s (hopefully) theirs. It helps to create a clean slate between what used to be yours and what might as well be theirs.
Photos For Websites
If you plan on painting, please make sure that you paint it and take care of all your maintenance needs before taking photos. Surely you work in the same; you look at a website that sells homes, and you go through the pictures first – if you see a house that is dirty, ugly, or has bold unattractive colors, you can bet that you probably either X that house out completely or it sort of deflates your excitement. Well, potential buyers are the same when they look at pictures. So make sure everything is done before you take pictures or invite people in to have a look at the inside. This not only includes the walls being painted. Make sure your carpets are cleaned or ripped out and new carpets are added. Make sure that if there are any blemishes on the walls like dents and holes that you fill those in sand them down and paint over them. If you have wood flooring, make sure it’s swept, mopped and shined. If you have ceiling fans, make sure they are clean and the tops of the blades have been dusted and cleaned properly. All of these things seem like a lot of work, but they will be worth it in the end.
The Negatives
As you can see from above, there are a lot of positives to painting a house you want to sell. But, you can also see some secondary negatives as well. For one, this is going to be expensive. You can either do it on your own or hire an interior painter in Summit. If you do it on your own there could be mistakes. But, if you hire a professional you can almost guarantee it will be done perfectly the first time around.
This is time consuming. But, again it’s really worth it in the long run!