Painting the Walls Neutral: How Early do you Plan for Resale?

Last week I explained how we painted our striped accent wall in the living room, and asked a few questions.  I promised I would have another question for you this week, and here it is!  In regards to painting your walls, how early do you plan for resale?

I am thinking that when we move the office stuff downstairs, and then move the guest bedroom from the Blue Room to the Pink Room, that it might be easiest to paint the walls while the rooms are empty.  The Blue Room will be turning into a nursery and I assume that once little babies are involved, it’s harder to decorate when you want?

But I love the Blue Room and the Pink Room!  And I would really like to keep their main pink/blue colours as they are… but I also know that when we plan on selling our house – not everyone likes bright colours as much as me.

This leaves me with a few options!

Do I paint the rooms a neutral colour (I would do a light-ish gray) and leave one accent wall as the bright colour, or do I leave two accent walls?  Do I only do one wall gray?

I’ve done a few little mock-ups of how the rooms would look with the different walls painted.

Here is the room layout just in case you needed a reminder of how the space is situated.  (You can see where they are in relation to each other in the Current Home section)

Do we leave the South wall (where the head of the bed is) the bright colour, or keep the West wall blue?

If we paint the North or the East walls, would we paint the entire jutted out space, or just the corresponding walls?

For the Pink Room, the space is square so there are a bit less decisions to make, but it’s still similar.

Would we want to match the same painted walls (ie: window/South wall in the bright accent colour) or do we choose a different wall in each room?

If we kept the North walls (with the door) painted, you wouldn’t really notice the bright colour until you walked into the room.  (Same for the walls adjoining the doors).

So many options!

The idea would be to use a gray colour that is 50% lighter than the main gray in our house (Rona’s “Taupe”) and we would be using this colour in the basement as well (whenever we get to renovating that area).

Again, the main question is: how early do you plan for resale?

We aren’t going to be moving for another few years, but if we could paint the walls now (again, when the rooms are empty) it might be more convenient than waiting until later.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!  Have you recently sold a house, and did you do some painting prep before you showed it?  Or are you thinking of selling your house sometime soon and had some bright paint or custom design choices that might not appeal to all buyers?  Or are you like us and are planning on selling in a few years, and want to start thinking of how best to approach everything?

Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see you in the New Year!