How to Decorate a Home You Plan to Sell in the Future

• Posted on June 09, 2014

It’s hard to balance decorating your home to your own personal taste, and keeping its resale value intact. You want to enjoy your love of bright colors, but you don’t want to repaint every room when you move. How do you find the middle ground?

Interior Décor

Your home is your sanctuary. It should be decorated just how you like it. Just because you are planning on reselling your home in the future, doesn’t mean you have to live in a neutral, conservative space. Keep these factors in mind when you are decorating:

Walls

Feel free to paint your walls, but keep a few things in mind. The colors and/or designs on your walls go through trends and phases just like fashion. Beige used to be the popular wall color, but now the trends are leaning toward bolder, brighter colors, stripes, or muted grays with brightly colored accent pieces. Even though these bold designs are trending, you still can’t guarantee a potential buyer would like the specific color or design you have chosen.

If you don’t want to paint your walls neutral colors, that’s fine. Just know you’ll have to paint over any unique designs if you want to sell your home. This can be a problem if you’ve painted a textured design on the wall. For example, you’d have to sand down a wall that had been sponged or striped so that the texture of the design won’t show through the new paint job. Dark colors are also hard to cover up because of how many coats it takes to hide the dark hue.

You should also avoid putting holes in your walls. The easiest way to hang a painting or a picture is with a nail. However, a buyer may not like a home that has multiple tiny holes in its walls. If you are willing to do the extra work, you can go through you home and patch any holes before selling, but even patches can stand out even after being painted to match the wall.

So what are your alternatives for hanging pictures on the wall? Tape can peel the paint, and sticky tack can leave grease marks. One of the best methods is to use Command sticky Velcro or hooks. These come off the wall without leaving any destruction behind. They also can hold quite a bit of weight if applied correctly.

Major Renovations

One of the worst things you can do for the resale value of your home is to take out a bedroom. You typically list how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in a home when you sell it. For example, a home may be a 3 bed 2.5 bath house. If you knock down a wall between two bedrooms in order to make an office or a studio or anything else, you have to lower the number of bedrooms when you sell the house—2 bed 2.5 bath.

Some good renovations you can perform to increase your resale value include upgrading or remodeling a kitchen or a bathroom, or finishing an unfinished basement or bathroom.

Minimalism

When you are trying to sell a home, you will typically be showing it with all of your own decorations. Keep those decorations as minimal as possible. Too many décor items—even if they look good—can give a home a cluttered feel. Minimal decorating styles often open a home up more and make it look bigger.

Exterior Design

The interior isn’t the only part of your home’s design that potential buyers will care about. Your landscaping and exterior design both need to appeal to buyers as well. Two important aspects that affect a home’s curb appeal include landscaping and exterior paint.

Landscaping

Most buyers looking for a home in a neighborhood would like a yard with grass in it. If you take out all the grass in your yard, cover the ground with pebbles and boulders, and then install several weird statues across the property, your home may not be an attractive option for buyers.

Feel free to add whatever lawn ornaments and plants fit your fancy—they can easily be removed or replaced when you put your house up for sale.

Exterior Paint

The same rules for painting the inside of your house apply to painting the outside of your house. If you are going to choose a bold color or design, plan on repainting the house before selling it. The safest bet is to choose a conservative, neutral color that the majority of homebuyers would like—such as earth tones.

If you don’t plan on reselling your home, feel free to make whatever unique adjustments you’d like. It’s your home—make it a space that reflects your uniqueness. If you do want to sell your home in the future, customize the space in a non-permanent way. If you make any permanent changes, ask yourself “would the average home-buyer like this change?”