Selling your house - Part 1

I do not believe that selling my home makes me an expert but since I have received a lot of questions about what we did to sell our home so quickly for our asking price, the next few posts will list what worked for us.

1. The single most important thing we did was use an interior designer to select paint colors for our home.
This is something that we learned a long time ago. Interior designers know how to pull the elements of your rooms together with color. They know the current trends in color selection. They can use color to minimize some features and highlight others. They will save you money over the long term because you will not have to redo something that does not look like you expected it to or that really does not need to be redone. Lots and lots of money.

In our case, we had a brick wall inside our house that I worried about since it seemed dark and a little out of place. Friends suggested that we cover it or tear it out. My brilliant interior designer was able to solve this problem by selecting floors and colors that complimented the brick. That wall quickly became the best feature in our home and it was a far, far better solution than any we could have come up on our own. It looked wonderful and now it was a feature that set our home off from all the others in our neighborhood.

You are probably thinking I could do that myself. I will just get a book and pick out a pre-set color scheme. This is why that plan does not work.

Let’s say that you want to paint your house tan. There are hundreds of shades of tan. Have you considered the undertones in your flooring, how the light is going to affect the color? Have you remembered to consider other features in the room such as countertops, cabinets? Can you hold all these subtle shade variations in you head when you are looking at colors and visualize how this is going to look as a whole? Do you have a good idea of what the color will look like on a wall rather than on that little sample sheet? Do you know if tan is still a popular color or are you about to select your favorite color from ten years ago?

Interior designers spent four years or more in college learning how to do this. They are professionals at what they do. How likely is it really that you can duplicate their work for your specific home by watching HGTV for a few weeks? Find an interior designer you can work with rather than an interior decorator (these are not the same). It will not cost anywhere near as much as you imagine it will.

When we painted our house, there was not single color that we liked with one brush stroke out of the can but since only a fool would pay for advice that they do not try out, we continued painting. In every case, the color was wonderful once the room was finished. Each room flowed into the next one and they all complement each other. I might have been able to select a single color but there is no way I could have gotten it right for the whole house.

By the way, after the exterior of the house was painted, people have stopped and asked me what color it is. Since the color compliments the brick and roof of the house it looks very rich and it made a huge difference in the curb appeal of the house.

What color is it?

Tan

A very specific shade of tan selected for our home by someone who knew what they were doing.