Home sellers for years thought that painting the interior of their home beige, gray, or white would help their homes sell faster. Some realtors even suggested painting all the rooms realtor’s beige so that potential buyers could imagine their furniture against the neutral background. But studies show that a room painted a warm color — something with yellow or red in it — actually feels warmer and more inviting than an interior painted cool colors — greens or blues or the neutral colors.

And it is possible to have a cool color scheme that is warm and a warm color scheme that is cool. Consider teal blue a cool color and its warmer harmonious partner violet, or sunny warm yellow and its cooler partner lemon yellow. Every color can be warmed or cooled.

Neutral colors are supposed to be safe and go with everything, but comedian Bill Cosby had it right when he said, “The key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Neutral colors fail because there is no such thing as a color without warm or cool undertones. Paint companies offer hundreds of paint chips showing variations of neutral colors. Even the old stand-by white is never simply white. Look at a paint color brochure and you will see cool blue white to warm antique white.

Couple these inherent color variations with the colors already in a room, and they will further influence the neutral. Even in the “moved-out” for-sale home there will be colors affecting the colors on the walls. The colors of the hardwood floors, carpets, and drapes will touch the colors. Artificial light will cast a glow on the walls. Depending on the room’s orientation, the natural light coming through the windows will change the paint chip colors labeled “neutral” into something else.

The first step in creating a color scheme that will sell your home is to think of the house as a home and not a collection of separate rooms.

This could be achieved with a monochromatic scheme — various shades of the same color — but this color scheme would lack the excitement that can be created with analogous colors, those colors near each other on the color wheel.

Fabulous combinations like yellow-orange, yellow, and yellow-green; red-violet, red, and red-orange; blue-green, blue, and blue-violet — the possibilities are endless.

The human eye can pick out around ten million variations of color. And because analogous colors are related colors — they share a color — they are not jarring together, especially when they are the same value (have the same degree of lightness or darkness).

Accentuate the Positive and De-emphasize Negative
No one wants to have a potential buyer walk into home and have a negative reaction because the ceilings are too high or too low, a room is to narrow or too wide, or the living space feels to big or too small.

When we see color, what we are actually seeing is an object’s reflection of light. Each wavelength creates a color image. Cool colors — blues, greens, and neutrals — recede because their shorter light waves make them seem farther away. They can make a small room seem bigger. Warm colors advance because their long light waves make them appear nearer than they really are. Warm colors can make a big room feel intimate. The lighter the color, the more light is reflected. The darker the color, the more light that is absorbed. Light colors make rooms seem larger, and dark colors shrink space.

A long narrow room or hallway can appear wider by painting the short walls a darker color than the long walls. The maximum illusion would be created by using a warm color as the darker color simply because warm colors appear to move inward. If this space was a dining room, think about how perception would be altered with the long walls painted a cooler lemon yellow and the short walls painted a warm coin gold, or the long walls a cooler light aqua and the short walls a warmer dark periwinkle.

Windowed walls will appear darker because they receive reflected light. A darker color used to frame a window is preferable when you want to emphasize the outside view.

To raise the visual height of a wall, bring the wall color up to the ceiling line. If there is molding or a picture rail, paint it the same color. To create the illusion of lowering a ceiling, paint the ceiling color down nine to twelve inches from the ceiling.

White ceilings give a sense of height and light, but if you don’t want the room to feel stark, think about painting the ceiling a shade lighter than the walls. Because ceiling color always reads a shade darker than it is, the ceiling will seem to be the same color as the walls.

It Is All About Light
Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it.” Since color is our perception of light, the source of that light is an important consideration in selecting colors.
The yellow glow of incandescent light works best with warm colors, the blue-white glow of fluorescent light works effectively with bright cool colors and white, and the intense white of halogen light washes out pastels but defines bright and saturated colors.

It is important to test color sample boards — the bigger the better — in the light that the color will most likely be seen in. For example, if a bedroom or family room is going to be used at night under incandescent yellowish light, it isn’t accurate to decide on the paint color for those rooms looking at paint samples under cold fluorescent light.
Natural light also varies. Natural light at noon has a blue-white cast, at sunrise a yellow cast, and at sunset a peach cast. Study the orientation of the rooms. The strong natural light in south-facing rooms favors darker saturated colors. Lighter colors compensate for the absence of direct sunlight in north-facing rooms. And if a south-facing room feels too warm, consider cooling it down using colors with blue or green in them; if a north-facing room feels too uninviting, warm it with yellow or reds.

Lively, Lively, Lively
Remember, selling your home is all about moving the buyer through it. Things can’t get dull. While using related colors makes for a unified decorating scheme, keep it from becoming stagnant by using the decorator’s rule of two-thirds of the color in the room being the body color and the other third being divided between trim and accent colors. Then be bold and select a complementary color as an accent — the color opposite on the color wheel from one of the anaglous colors in the room — to keep it interesting.

Just as dark colors look darker when placed near light colors, complementary colors look more intense when used side by side. And obviously, every room is not going to be painted the same color.
Harmony can be traced through rooms with moldings painted the same color or with ceilings painted the same color. Keep in mind that dark molding will make a room look smaller.

Another way to carry a color relationship through rooms is to alternate the quantity of colors in each room. For example, the majority color in one room can be the minority color in another and vice versa.

Finally, when it comes to painting the interior of a home, the owner should go with their color instincts. To sell a home you only need one buyer to accept the color scheme.

Paulette Rossi is a Certified Master Recycler living in Portland, OR.