360renos: The Interior Paint Market offers lots of choice.

How to make your home stand out when selling

We can help your house sell quickly and at a good price -- even in a slow market.

It takes a lot more than sparkling windows, scented candles and chocolate-chip cookies to sell a home in today's market.

Improvements should be made so that the property shows well, is consistent with the neighborhood and does not involve capital investments.

Beyond any doubt, the best investment you can make is new paint. Painting can make a room or an exterior façade look brand-new, and totally transform the look and feel of a room or the entire residence. It is always wise to be somewhat restrained when choosing colors for a home-staging paint project. Avoid choosing colors that are too individual or flashy and favor neutral colors and schemes. This does not mean painting everything white, however.

Use subtle color schemes to accentuate the home's strengths and minimize weaknesses. Dark colors, for example, tend to make a room feel smaller, while lighter colors and pastels can make a room feel bigger.

There is another benefit to painting as well: the process of preparing the interior or exterior surfaces of a home for painting automatically allows us to go over the entire area receiving paint in great detail, and this can often expose items or areas requiring repair. It seems you always discover where the caulking has let go, where the wall is dinged.

It is always preferable that we discover and deal with these items before the real estate agent (or worse, the prospective buyer) points them out to you!

Dave - 360renos

Subscribe in a reader

Monday, November 10, 2008

The Interior Paint Market offers lots of choice.

Beauti-Tone - Well priced and carried nationally at Home Hardware, Beauti-Tone has a great website that covers project ideas, tips and trends. Web site: beauti-tone.ca

Behr - Widely available through Home Depot, Behr is one of the best of the mid-priced brands. Features like large-size paint chips and in-store colour-matching computers make it popular among home painters.Web site: behr.com

Benjamin Moore - A favourite brand with designers as well as consumers, both of whom like the paint line's vast range of colours, it offers excellent coverage and wear. Widely available.Web site: benjaminmoore.ca

CIL Paints - One of the best-kept industry secrets, CIL is an excellent mid- to premium-priced paint with a beautiful colour palette. Its parent company, ICI, makes several fine house brands, such as Color Your World.Web site: cilpaint.com

General Paint - All-Canadian General Paint was one of the first to design software that lets you scan a room photo and preview it in a paint shade. General's Z-Coat is one of the most environmentally friendly latex paints on the market.Web site: generalpaint.com

Martha Stewart Everyday Colors - You can't beat Martha's taste, and the paint chips show potential colour combos, making it easy to capture the decor guru's knack for coordination. Midpriced and widely available.Available at: canadiantire.ca

Para Paints - Another venerable Canadian company, Para is known for such innovations as durable and scrubbable Elite eggshells and flats, and their Group of Seven line, which incorporates colours inspired by the canvases of Canada's legendary art movement.Web site: para.com

Ralph Lauren Paint - Ralph Lauren Paint has the same designer cachet as Martha Stewart Everyday Colors and is similar in quality. Along with the basic finishes, there are textured paint treatments such as Suede and River Rock, which require specialized application methods.Web site:rlhome.polo.com

Sico - One of the oldest Canadian companies, Sico is known for its super-washable flat paint, Cashmere, and for accuracy in nailing reds, often a difficult pigment for many companies to formulate. Web site: sico.ca

Courtesy of Expert Advice
Dave - 360renos

No comments:

Post a Comment

Which Paint Is It - Latex or Oil?

Determining, definitively, whether a given paint was oil or latex has always been a bit of a problem, but an important one as you can paint oil over latex, but not latex over oil unless you use a special 'super adherent primer' first.

I used to recommend taking a bit of paint thinner on a clean contrasting colour cloth and wiping hard. If any colour comes off, it is oil based paint. If nothing happens, it is latex. But that didn't always work. Sometimes if the paint was very old, nothing at all came off.

Now a product has come out that reverses those rules. These swabs have acetone in them and they have no affect on oil based paints, but do take off latex. If the surface is stripped, it is Latex paint. If it just cleans or polishes the surface, it is Oil/Alkyd paint. Instead of the special swabs you could just use acetone and a contrasting coloured rag, if the paint colour shows up on the rag, it is latex. Acetone will do nothing to oil based paints. Old fingernail polish removers were made with acetone, and many still are -- look for a bottle that does not say 'without acetone'. You should test it first on a surface that you know is latex paint to be sure you have acetone in your liquid.

By the way, if you really want to paint latex over oil -- you can do it if you sand off the gloss and apply a "super adherent latex primer" first. Then you can continue with ordinary latex paint!

Dave - www.360renos.ca