Use Neutral Colors When Home Selling in Sacramento

A reader from The Balance homebuying website wrote yesterday. She was clear that she had written to me previously and seemed a bit perplexed that I had not yet answered her inquiry, which I had not received. She had a “very important question.” She and her husband had been engaged in “repeated discussions” regarding the color of the walls for their mother’s home. They were preparing the home for sale and could not agree on which colors constitute neutral colors when home selling. She did not understand the word “neutral.”

At first blush, one might wonder how a person could be confused. But the more I thought about it, it’s not so unusual for some individuals, especially those from other cultures, to be perplexed about color. Many Americans live in a white-bread world. No color at all. But other cultures are awash in color and relish color. Color is treated as a daily substance. It’s water for the thirsty, spiritual for the soul and serenity for sleep. Color brings the world alive.

However, when you are selling a home, neutral is the recommended choice of color, especially for walls and flooring. It evokes no emotion and does not detract from the home’s features. It presents a clean slate, a home you can move into immediately and decorate to preference. It’s a light beige, a sheer coffee-cream, sandy fair-skinned brown, boring pale tan, much like the photo above, or even a soft gray, which is trendy. Above all, it is not white.

Case in point, when my husband and I bought our home in Land Park 17 years ago, the whole house screamed for color accents. It was white. The previous owners did not use neutral colors when home selling. In the photo above, it’s not how I would stage a home for sale, but it does show the recommended color for walls. Since we are not selling, our master suite now has bamboo flooring, dual-pane windows with neutral blinds, and the walls are painted my favorite cat-puke-green color, with a slightly lighter shade on the ceiling. Not everybody’s cup of tea, but it works for us.

However, if we expect to maximize profit potential on resale, eventually we will need to embrace neutral colors when home selling.