Painting Your Home Prior to Selling is a Great Idea

If you planning on selling your home a new coat of paint will do wonders for some properties. Spanking new paint gives the impression of well looked after home and is attractive to most potential buyers.

It’s almost always a good idea to paint before you sell your house, assuming your timeline and budget allow for it.

Painting is relatively cheap and makes a big impact on your ability to attract interest to your home.

Interior and exterior paint jobs are quite different, so they’ll need to be considered separately.

• Interior paint jobs are usually cheaper because they’re fairly simple, and you may only have to paint a couple of rooms.

• Exterior paint jobs are usually more expensive because of their size and complexity, which often means that doing it yourself is out of the question.

Painting a room is properly accomplished by starting at the ceiling and then the top of your walls ending at the bottom. Paint the ceiling first and end up by doing your baseboards last. Painting your house is a great way to spruce it prior to selling, but remember to use neutral colours, there is no advantage to picking colours that most people will want to paint over prior to moving in. Beige is a very neutral colour that will usually make your rooms look larger and will require hardly any work if potential buyer wants to change the colour.

Compelling Reasons to Paint Your Home

• Dark and/or inconsistent paint schemes can often make rooms — or your entire house — feel stuffy and cramped.  To mask dark colors, lay down one to two coats of primer before applying light paint. This will ensure that the dark color does not bleed through to the top coat.  (lighter paint colours tend to open up rooms and make them appear larger)

• Wood grain cabinets, linoleum floors, and other features can make an old house look out of date. Simple touches like painting dated kitchen cabinets white can transform the appearance of an old house.

• Unpleasant odors such as cigarette smoke can seep into your walls and become a huge turnoff to potential buyers.  There are special paints that you can apply to smelly walls to lock in bad odors before laying down your top coat.

• You may want to list your house as soon as possible, but you realize that it needs to be painted quickly before listing photos are taken. Get an all-in-one paint and primer that dries quickly so that you can save time and minimize prep work.

• With time, paint can get stained by spills or start to crack and peel. Minor patches can be repaired with spackling, but more extensive repairs will probably require you to hire a handyman who can replace drywall before priming and painting.

The most important first step in painting is to ensure you have a good surface prior to painting. TSP is used by most professionals and removes a number of accumulated greases and soils prior to painting. Smoking can add quite a build up of stains etc to your home. Any colours or finishes that bleed will have to first covered with a stain-blocking primer. Wood knots and grains will bleed if not pre-treated.

Don’t use cheap paints, according to experts at the Paint Quality Institute. Your more expensive paints will apply easier, not show brush marks and be more durable than cheaper paints. Your time is valuable and if you have to add another coat of paint to get the same coverage there was not much savings.

Buy good painting tools, don’t skimp and buy the economy pack of brushes or rollers. A good brush will be well balanced and have denser bristles than its cheaper counter part. Good rollers will hold more paint and require a lot less work to apply the paint. Better brushes are now synthetic and hold their shape regardless of water exposure.

Invest in some large paint sheets to protect your floors, furniture and carpets. This will save lot of un-necessary cleaning and possible stains that will remain visible.

Selling or Buying a Cottage?  Read our Article on Cottage Roof Structure

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