When you're house shopping, does interior paint color stop you from buying??

[dizagain]

DFIL is a realtor and I just got a BIG lecture because I painted a bathroom sage green and not a "neutral" color. He also hates my pale yellow walls throughout my house because they're not white. Because of DH's job, we'll probably have to move in the next year or two. DFIL is already planning what we'll have to do to our house to sell...including re-painting everything WHITE. Ugh! I know that when I've house-hunted in the past, I always assume I can change paint color and look at the style, lay-out,and condition of a home. He swears that most of his clients fuss about paint color and often turn down homes because they think they'll have to re-decorate too much.

Well, I wanna LIVE in MY house NOW!!!! Anyway, it's not like I painted it neon pink with purple polka dots (which DD would actually LOVE) or anything! What do you think?

 

[snoopy]

Nope. My biggest concern is the structure of the house, and how recent large repairs have been made. I could care less about aestetics, I am going to change them to my liking anyway.

 

[SC Minnie]

I don't let paint color affect my judgement unless it is a horrible color and there are many rooms that would need to be painted or wallpaper taken down.

I wouldn't think pale yellow would be that bad or the sage green for that matter. As long as your house is 'staged' properly when you go to sell. On the A&E to Sell This House he often uses sage green and pale yellows but mostly tans and beiges. Rarely does he paint everything white.

 

[NMAmy]

I just purchased a home so I've been dealing with this recently. I always figure I can repaint but we went to one house that I just could NOT get past the paint. One bathroom was, I swear, Pepto-Bismol pink. And every room and hallway and even the stairwell had wallpaper border. Just the thought of removing all those borders and repainting EVERY room before we moved in made me cringe. Some of the rooms were cute for the homeowner's perspective but I don't have small children so one room done in teddy bears and one room done in primary colors (a different one on every wall) and Sesame Street would not work for me.

Now the house I purchased has some rooms painted in pale colors and some rooms have wallpaper. I hate wallpaper but it was tasteful enough for me to live with until I have time to remove it. I think if you pick pale colors and nothing to outrageous, it shouldn't turn anyone away.

 

[DisneyGoddess]

I agree with the other posters - paint color did not help nor hinder our buying process. Paint is very very easily changed. The only way I can imagine a color hurting the sale of a home is if the color very very distracting in some way (all walls hot pink) - I think you have NOTHING to worry about with sage green IMO.

 

[sk!mom]

No, I look at the structural issues. Are the rooms large enough? Things that would be difficult and really costly to change.

I have never moved right in without changing paint colors, carpet, stripping wallpaper, etc... I personally would want to paint over white walls just as quickly as any other color. I love color.

Your FIL would hate my house. DD8's room is painted a really deep fuschia, one bathroom is lavender and white, the other is a deep burgandy with taupe tile and cabinets, master bedroom is a dark brown with taupe trim. The three hallways, two living areas, kitchen, and dining room have all just been repainted a dark khaki with white crown molding, trim, and chair rail. My living room has one burgandy wall.

My feeling is that we live in this house now and I want it to reflect what we like. DD said about a month after we painted her room the color she wanted, "this room just makes me feel happy." If I ever need or want to sell I could repaint if necessary.

 

[Pembo]

Not unless it is very bold. We looked at a house that had very bright and bold colors on the walls and I kept thinking how much primer it would take to cover it. We also bought a house with LOTS of wallpaper. I swore I'd never do that again. We spent 2 years removing it all.

Sage green and pale yellow aren't that weird. Paint away. I sold a house with Disney Characters painted on the walls.

 

[Disney Ella]

I know realtors always make a big thing about walls being neutral, but it never affected my decision. If the house has the right layout and the rooms are the right size, I don't care what color it's painted. If the rooms are all white, I'm going to repaint anyway, so what difference does it make if I'm painting walls that were white or walls that were some color?

 

[dizagain]

I knew you guys would make me feel better! I didn't mention that DD does have one bright lime green wall, but we'll worry about that when the time comes! Wallpaper is what really drives me crazy...our house had so much of it. Slowly getting rid of it, but not done yet. Trust me, my pretty sage green looks MUCH better than nave blue and white striped paper. Now if we could just fix DH's office...embossed wallpaper in a stripe with two shades of gray!!! OOOOOH GROSS!!! DFIL says that room is FINE as it is NEUTRAL...

 

[Pin Wizard]

YES! As a single mom, I'm not going to redo it myself, and I'm not going to pay the bucks for someone else to do it. As a matter of fact, I quickly turned down the first townhouse I saw with my recent move due to color!

It was HORRIBLE! The first floor had a DARK mauve color on the bottom half of the walls, beigie on the top half...mauve carpeting. (I likes pinks and purples, but this was way too overpowering!) The kitchen was dark, dark green. In one of the bathrooms upstairs, the woman had put purple adhesive flowers on every other tile in there! It was tooo much and looked horrible. I liked the layout, but I knew I wouldn't redo anything. First question my realtor asked me was...can you live with all the color. I quickly said no!!! I won't even go into their revamping the garage into a storage room.

LOVE my townhouse I did buy. Off white walls, white celings except for the two bathrooms. The downstairs bathroom is a light peach, upstairs in the master bedroom is antique yellow. They're both BEAUTIFUL and I love them!! Both light colors.

So paint, etc. makes a huge difference with me.

Oh! I must say that my home now has this horrible green carpeting. Hate it! LOL!

**Edit** I should say that the master bedroom is also antique yellow like the bathroom, and the downstairs bedroom is peachy like that bathroom. Love them both! Won't change a thing.

 

[binny]

I hope a Dis'er come to buy my house when I go to sell
I have a whole Mickey room. The bottom half is bright yellow there is a Mickey border at the chair rail level with red chair rail on either side of the border and the top half is bright white.

I think it looks really cute and it is a play room after all. I hope someone likes Mickey I dont want to change it when we go to move.
My girls room is in lavender with a big sun and clouds on the ceiling and Cams room has sports border at the top of his room.
My entry way is marbled and I have a blue wall in my living room. Oh and the kids bathroom has a Classic Pooh Bear border that was here when we bought it and our bathroom has lighthouses all over it.

Guess your FIL would have a field day here! lol

Actually my friend who is a realtor loves what weve done with it!

 

[KristaTX]

I think it kind of depends on how old the house is and who your expected buyer-type is. If it is really old (ours was built in the '30s), I'd expect that the walls have been painted many, many times. Color just goes with the territory. Most people who buy old houses seem to like to do some work to it themselves anyway. It's part of the fun of an old house.

Since your house is in Flower Mound my guess is that it is fairly new and that families might want a house they can just move in to without having to do much work on. But I could be wrong.

If I were going to purchase a newer house I'd hope that most of the walls would be sort of cream/taupe with white or wood trim. Sage green is kind of earthy, so I'd like it and I'm sure many people would. If your rooms were painted in non-earth tones (e.g. purple, pink, red, blue) or with funky techniques, I'd say paint them. Also if every room in the house were painted different colors that didn't "flow" together I wouldn't buy the house. But on the other hand, paint is much easier to change than wallpaper. I don't think I'll ever put wallpaper in a house.

If the pale yellow is a VERY neutral pale yellow it wouldn't turn me off, especially if the trim is white and not brown. And I say leave the sage green. It's just a bathroom, the color is popular, and most people like it.

 

[inaminute]

If paint color bothered me, we wouldn't be in our house today!

It had dark peach walls with red carpeting in the living room, dining room, entryway, and hallway. The kitchen was off-white, one bedroom was bright hot pink with olive green carpeting, the other was dark blue with a stained multi-blue shag carpeting, and the master bedroom was bright turquoise! The rest of the rooms were a dingy off-white.

We joked that they must have been color blind!

I concetrated more on the layout and the potential for decorating it the way I wanted. We still have some carpet to replace, and we're looking to re-paint over the winter months.

 

[Kallison]

No -- when we bought our current house 10 years ago all the walls were a mess. We looked at the location more than anything. When we sold our townhouse DH had stenciled our oldest DS's walls with planes in multicolors. The whole project took him like 28 hours. He made the buyers PROMISE they wouldn't paint over it. We drove by a few years later and you could still see the planes up on the wall.

 

[RedxPanda]

Dbf and i are house hunting for the near future. IMO, the hardest part is finding an available house with a layout you like! who cares how its decorated.

 

[ZachnElli]

No. Our last house they had intentionally painted the entire interior pink! It was 4600 sq ft (including finished basement) of pink! Dh hated the color, but we still bought it. We paid a painter to repaint the interior neutral before we closed (which made the realtor very nervous, but we paid the painter already so even if it fell thru, the house was painted neutral on our dime). By the time we sold it, I had painted the dining room a very dark maroon color, the kitchen, dinette (separate room from kitchen), and laundry room sage green, had a Mickey Mouse bathroom ,and dd's room was pink and lavendar with Cinderella stenciled on the walls. The realtors at first said it was great, we signed a contract and they suddenly hated it! Grrr! I don't have good luck with realtors! But it sold 2 days before it went on the market to the first person who looked at it! I understand the kitchen has already been redone with new appliances (which it needed badly!). So the colors didn't stop them! And their kids are grown and gone, so I'm sure they'll paint over Cindy and Mickey. I'm planning and starting my kids' rooms this week in our new house, already did the master, it was red, now it's sage green! Our new "bonus" room will be the new Disney themed room, haven't started it yet though.

 

[jrydberg]

When I bought my place last year, the owner was really surprised that I ended up buying it -- she was concerned that the place was "too girlie" for me. But hey, all that can be changed.

The funny thing is, the first thing I wanted to change was the dining room wallpaper. Too flowery. So my mother came down to help me take the wallpaper down. What's underneath the flowery wallpaper, you ask? Pink paint!

 

[binny]

Hey ZachnElli you should come over and check out our Mickey Bonus room this week .
If you need a hand painting let me know I love to paint! ( strange I know lol)

 

[Amberle3]

Last time I looked for a house to buy, I walked into every single one assuming that I would be painting etc.

My DFi just signed a lease for a house (moving out of his horrid apartment) and the first thing I said when we looked at the house was "the carpeting has got to go". Yes, it's a rental but the owners seem okay with us taking up the carpeting. I have pretty severe allergies for one thing, and carpets (especially like that) would need to be vacuumed every day.

The carpets in the house are at least 30 years old, and while most of them are a golden mustard yellow pile the hallway is a deep crimson red pile.

Now I don't know if the owner know (yet) that we want to take up ALL the carpeting and not just the stuff in the bedroom, but we'll be discussing that with them in the coming weeks. I think there's just a laminate flooring underneath (the owner helped us check in the bedroom and that's what was there) but I'd love to put parquet flooring in. We'll be trying to negotiate that with the owner as well, as we don't mind paying part of the cost and installing it ourselves (that would be me installing it) but since it's just going to increase the market value of the house it would be nice if they put up some of the money for the supplies.

 

[DrCavin]

It would not influence my decision on whether I would buy the house or not. It would effect the price I offer to purchase the house for.

A house down the street from us was for sale for 4 months. The realtor claimed that many people said they liked the house, but not the colors. The owners had the walls painted a neautral color & the house sold in 2 weeks. I guess people want to buy & move in without having to have any work done.