Home › Color Questions (Interior) › Home Staging

Staging A Home To Sell:
How To Stage A Home Using The Right Paints

"I'm staging a home to sell. How can I stage my home for sale just by painting the walls & trims?  Could you give me some virtual home staging tips?"
(Reader Question)

---

---

Hello Lyn,

I've had a bit of a play with Sherwin Williams color palettes as they appear on screen - you'd have to check if they really look like that in your house!  I'm going to show you some "Home Staging Before And After" ideas with a focus on
a) the flooring, and
b) the kitchen/countertop issue.

Staging A Home To Sell:
Color Analysis 1 - Floors

Here's a collage of all the floor coverings on your ground floor. Below that is the paint color range you're considering for wall and woodwork paints:

Even though your flooring is all in warm neutrals (except for the navy kitchen tiles - a great, versatile color for staging a home to sell), there are too many hues of brown to integrate:

• the brown entrance tiles have reddish copper accents
• the floorboards have a yellow/orange bias
• the sunroom tiles are distinctly pink
• the carpet is a fairly neutral oatmeal, but flecked with both gray/taupe and cognac.

The 'Kilim Beige' color range looks closest in color to the carpet, but it doesn't seem to blend well with any of the tiles, or with the wooden floors.

Obviously, my judgement is limited because I'm not there to physically see the colors in your home (under different lighting conditions - artificial and daylight). But if you were to choose the "Kilim" range, I'd use only very light tints and paint the trims white to lift the color scheme.

I have a hunch, though, that a more neutral approach may do a better job of uniting the space and your 'patchwork' of flooring materials.

Staging A Home To Sell:
Color Analysis 2 - Colors that 'Neutralize'

To create a unified look for the whole ground floor, I would paint

• the majority of the walls in a soft white, plus
• some areas (e.g. panelling, or above/below chair rails) a very neutral, complex light gray that looks "alive".

Here are two color samples - "Repose Gray" and "Passive" - next to your flooring.

Virtual Home Staging:
Trying Colors Out

Let's try all three color ranges in a space that unites three flooring materials.

So here's a home staging before and after. First, the original:

Now I've 'painted' it "Repose Gray" (with white trims):

Next, "Passive":

Then, "Kilim Beige":

Which one looks best?  Out of the three, I prefer "Repose Gray" - it is warmer and softer than the cool "Passive" but not as yellowish-brown as "Kilim Beige" - even though the latter appears to go best with the cupboard behind the kitchen entrance (at least in this virtual home staging exercise).

Your main concern needs to be: Which color would go best with all the flooring materials?

How To Stage A Home Using Color:
Integrating The Odd One Out

If you're keeping the red countertop in the kitchen, you need to repeat this color elsewhere in the room, otherwise the countertop will stick out like a sore thumb. By spreading the red color around a little, you can turn it into an attractive feature (and red in the kitchen is a pretty common choice!)

One option would be to repeat the color in accessories:

• a large red plate on the table
• red cushions on chairs or window seats
• a red tablecloth ...

Or, you could retain the red door frames and trims in this room:

Either of these, I think, would work better than introducing pale sage as a new wall color, in addition to red and navy. If you're going to have color in the kitchen, you might as well go with what's already there ... and make that a self-assured statement :-)

So that's Staging A Home To Sell in a nutshell. I hope you can use some of this, Lyn, and I wish you the best of luck with your project, as well as a fast sale ... at a very nice price!

More Information About Using Color:

Check out this Mini Bookshop, too (in partnership with Amazon):

Yet to find the information you're looking for? Type a word or phrase into the search box below: