Having your house painted adds value

In this great article submitted by an American user of this website, he talks about how painting your home can add value when selling it.

If you are looking to get the external walls of your home painted, be careful when it comes to choosing a colour! Whilst on impulse, you may think the Pink walls and lime green moulding looks fantastic, but once reality hits and you get sick of it, and if you are trying to sell, the colour puts people off, then choosing a more neutral colour may be a better idea!

Bob Vila of This Old House fame tells people to “…be kind to their neighbours when picking a colour scheme.” His house painting advice is echoed by realtors (Estate agents) and builders across the country.(USA).

The colour that you paint your house, they say, can affect the value of all the other houses in your neighbourhood. That’s one of the reasons that many home-owner associations limit house painting colour choices for homes in their communities.

While you might feel that house painting is a personal choice, there’s a good deal of sense to the painting restrictions that some home-owners face. A garish purple house with Halloween orange shutters on the block can effectively make it almost impossible for anyone else in the neighbourhood to get full value for their home if they choose to sell. A cohesive house painting colour scheme that’s carried on from property to property adds enormously to the appeal of a neighbourhood.

In some cases, the house painting restrictions are based on more than just owner preference. On the West Side of one New England town, for instance, is a neighbourhood of historic (ED: HISTORIC? THIS IS AMERICA WE ARE TALKING ABOUT……HUH, ANYWAY…. ) period houses all built in a similar Edwardian style. Owners who purchase houses in the Tatnuck community usually sign an agreement upon purchase that they will maintain a white or Gray exterior with shutters in black, green or red – and that they will only use white Christmas lights at the holidays.

So what colours are good choices for exterior house painting?

According to Realty Time magazine, the choices are, in order, white, grey, blue, tan or brown, cream, beige, green, yellow and red.

Of those, the overwhelmingly most popular house painting colour is white, with over 37 percent of all homeowners stating that if they were repainting a house, they would choose white.

While grey is the second most popular colour in the USA, most realtors would recommend painting your house a pale shade if that’s your choice. The reason? Lighter colours brighten a house and make it seem more spacious.

Among the other colours, the favoured shades tend to be muted tones, often in ‘historical’ themes. House paint manufacturers like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams often name their paint colours to cater to that trend. Thousands of houses across the country are painted Williamsburg blue or Colonial green.

If you do want brighter accents in your exterior house painting scheme, advise Realtors, confine yourself to the front door and shutters. A front door that’s painted a friendly blue or warm red, they say, puts buyers in a good mood as they enter your house. And who’d know better than the guys that sell houses?

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International

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