People are effected by color.  When you walk into a house, one of the first things that you notice is the color and whether you realize it or not, you respond to the colors.  Colors need to be considered when rehabbing your property because home buyers consider it in their home buying decisions.   So how do you choose which colors to use in your property?  Here are 5 tips to help you pick the right paint color for your rehab project.

Consider the mood
Each room of a house has a mood and color plays a huge part of setting the mood.  When thinking about which colors to use, think about what type of mood you will want the room to portray.  When painting the bedrooms, will you want a relaxed, restful, soothing mood, or would you want more of a personal, intimate mood?  Neutral colors, cool colors, and soft colors usually create the feelings of relaxation while colors that are warmer and stronger usually create more of a private intimate type of mood.

What about the living room?  Do you want more of a sociable mood or more of a formal mood?  Warmer and often times contrasting colors are mostly used for that sociable feeling while deeper colors or neutral colors often times are more formal or enlightening.

Pay attention to lighting
Lighting plays a huge part in a house.  Lighting can make a room look larger.  Lighting can also bring out the color of a room.  Natural sunlight can show the trueness of a color.  Incandescent bulbs can better bring out warm and neutral tones.  Fluorescent lighting works better on blue tones.  Keeping this in mind, a strong color like a bold red might not work as well by a huge window which gives a lot of sunlight as much as it would work in a room that doesn’t have much sunlight but uses incandescent lighting.  The sunlight would make the red look more bold and intrusive while the incandescent lighting will make it strong but intimate.  Use the light boxes in the paint store to test your paint color.

Staying neutral appears to more buyers
When selling a home, neutral colors work best.  Strong bold hues such as red or green can be a gamble because it could make or break a sale.  Colors other than neutral colors may not match the furniture and décor that the buyers considered using in their new home.  However, neutral colors such as beige, ivory, taupe, gray, and white leaves a room neutral so that any décor of any color could fit perfectly in the room.

Follow the color wheel
A color wheel is a tool for modifying and intensifying two or more colors.  You can match many color combinations.  In your mind, thinking of gray walls as a main color, while keeping a soft green, soft blue, and yellow as accent colors may not seem like a great idea, but after seeing it visually, it could be one of the best color combinations that you have ever seen.  The color wheel will come in handy when deciding which colors to use.

Choose different paint finishes
Painting a room all in one color from the walls to the trim may be a little boring or bland especially if it is a neutral color, however if you use the same color but a different finish, it could make the room stand out and not lose any of its neutral feeling.  For example, when using the same hue for the walls and trim of a room, try using an eggshell finish on the walls and a semi-gloss finish on the trim.  This will make the colors appear slightly different in certain lighting.

Remember that your color choice, no matter what the choice must flow with the house and it must look modern.  Try to use colors that are popular so that the house will have a greater chance of being sold.  Check out home remodeling magazines and TV shows to get some ideas.  Go check out houses on the market from other investors to get ideas from their project.  It will only help you decide what is “in” now and what will sell.