Increase The Selling Price of Your House With Exterior Painting

Bob Vila of This Old House fame tells people to “…be kind to their neighbors when picking a colour scheme.” His house painting advice is echoed by realtors and builders across the country. The colour that you paint your house, they say, can affect the value of all the other houses in your neighborhood. That’s one of the reasons that many Toronto homeowner 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 homeowners face. A garish purple house with Halloween orange shutters on the block can effectively make it almost impossible for anyone else in the neighborhood 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 neighborhood.

So what colours are good choices for exterior house painting?

According to Realty Time magazine, the choices are, in order, white, gray, 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 gray is the second most popular colour, 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 favored 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?