When you’re trying to sell a grey split level house, you might have a tough time competing against other houses on the market that have a more exciting or exotic curb appeal to them. In some housing markets, the competition is stiff and buyers expect those who are selling homes to wow them with a gorgeous house that is trendy and colorful. If your home is gray and reminds people of rainy, doldrums weather when they see it, they might pass it up for a home that gives a bright, memorable impression.
There may be many homes on your block that are gray and have a split-level structure. This means that you’ll be competing with their pricing and also the features that they install in the home for upgrades before putting the houses on the market. If your house is kind of boring, you might worry that your home will not be good enough for buyers to want to purchase it. Before you lose hope, you should follow our tips below to get your house to snatch the attention of potential homebuyers as they’re walking down your street or scrolling through housing listings on an online platform.
Trust Your Gut, Not Someone Else’s
When you’re trying to improve your grey split level house before putting it on the market, you should follow your feelings and trust your understanding of the job market. In the same way that you wouldn’t blindly follow someone to the point of important document destruction, you shouldn’t blindly follow people’s advice about how you can make your house more attractive to potential buyers. It’s one thing to listen to friendly advice and take it with a grain of salt. It’s another thing to bend over backward to the whims of others. If a lot of people in your life are giving you unsolicited advice about what you should do to make your gray house look less drab, it can be annoying. To make it worse, when that advice is conflicting, it can be hard to decide what advice to follow and what suggestions to politely decline to use.
When you become a homeowner, you’re in the captain’s seat for making decisions for your home. From the day that you’re handed the keys to your house to the day that you exchange the keys with the new homeowners of the property, you’re the one who is in charge of how you handle every interaction. While this responsibility can feel like a burden at times, it can also be nice to know that you have all the tools you need to make good decisions.
You can ask for advice when you need it, but ultimately it’s your house until you sell it to someone else so you need to make choices that make you feel like you’re doing the best you can to prepare your house for sale and increase the curb appeal of the property. If your choices start to feel like they’re coming from a place of pleasing others, you may begin to resent those around you. What’s more, your home could lose that personal charm that happens when someone is making choices for their home that they feel are good ones.
Hire Professional Contractors
Before you can make a grey split level house look better, you need to attend to the house’s maintenance needs. From hiring a roofing contractor to getting the HVAC and septic systems inspected, you won’t want to try to do these jobs yourself. Even if you’re a maintenance professional who has had years of experience in multiple aspects of the construction industry, you don’t want to take on more than you can handle. There’s a reason why professional construction services have a whole team of people who are qualified to accomplish the job. Even if you had all of the construction and maintenance knowledge in the world, you’d still need professional contractors to support you with certain jobs.
It pays to hire professional contractors because they can ensure that the job is done correctly. They can also give your jobs a sense of legitimacy that isn’t there for potential homeowners if some of them are completed as a do-it-yourself project. Although doing it yourself can save you some money in the short term, it can also lead to long-term problems down the road that could be avoided if you hired professional contractors in the first place.
The last thing you want to do when you’re selling a house is increase the timeline for repairs because you tried to repair or renovate something yourself and ended up creating a huge mess or safety concern that needed the professionals to come in to fix it. When you botch a DIY job, you waste time and money when you have to call in the professionals anyway. For this reason, you might as well get the pros to handle it the first time. After all, that’s what they’re there to do!
Balance Budget and Beauty
If you’re trying to improve the appearance of a grey split level house so it’s more attractive to potential buyers, you should consider what you can afford and what you would like to improve. You should prioritize the things that need to be done to make your home a safer place for the new owners to live such as replacing a roof that needs it by hiring an affordable roofing company for the job. Although you may want to add marble countertops and hardwood floors to the home, your budget may only have enough funds in it to install Formica countertops or luxury vinyl plank flooring options. There’s no shame in cutting corners where you can and making it less pricey to improve the home.
In essence, selling a home is a business transaction where you want to profit as much as possible. Part of making smart business decisions is keeping your bottom line healthy. If you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in renovations before you sell your house, you might not recoup those funds. Additionally, if the cost of the repairs and renovations drives the price of the home too high, potential home buyers may be more interested in buying homes that are cheaper even if it means that they don’t have the same luxury improvements that yours does. With everything in life, you need to strike a balance between what it costs and what you want. Renovating your gray house is no different.
Invest in New Roofing
When you’re trying to sell a grey split level house and you need to replace the roof, you should hire the best roofing contractor for the job. While it can feel expensive to hire a roofing service, it’s a necessary investment in your home. The roof has the important job of shielding the interior of the home from the elements. As a result, you won’t want to wait to replace the roof or skimp on it. Beyond the functional aspects of the roof, it affects the curb appeal and makes buyers more or less inclined to buy the home depending on the state of it.
Look For Services With Warranties
If you’re trying to make your grey split level house safer, you should find a local roofing who offers warranties on their work. This will give you peace of mind after the residential roofing service finishes the job. It may also make the new homeowners feel better about buying the home since they can take advantage of the warranty if anything goes wrong concerning that aspect of the home.
Have Sustainable Energy
If your home isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing, you can entice potential buyers by being environmentally friendly or sustainable. To do this, you should look into what sustainable energy options are offered by your local propane company. You can also look into solar energy.
Bulk Up the Landscaping
To make your grey split level house pop, focus on the landscaping and hardscaping. Call up the best hardscaping company in your area. Then, ask them what they can do to make your yard up-to-date on the latest trends.
Make the Space Accessible
Like with any person, place, or thing, what makes a grey split level house attractive is what’s on the inside or what qualities it has that make it functional for the use of the person who lives there, not necessarily how aesthetic it is or how closely it may follow the current home improvement trends that home decoration and design shows in the entertainment industry are popularizing at any given moment in time. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so while some homeowners or potential homeowners who are looking to buy a home may only care about how aesthetically pleasing the house is, there are plenty of people out there who would favor a place that functions in all of the accessible ways that they need over a house that looks nice and keeps up with the design choices of the surrounding homes.
For families who provide in-home care to their aging family members, having a house that can accommodate senior in home care is their version of a dream house. They don’t need a fancy lanai or marble countertops to make a drab gray house pop. Installing a stair lift that makes it easier for elderly family members or those who experience mobility issues will make the house all the more attractive to these types of potential buyers than a chandelier or new exterior paint job would.
Of course, if you’re going for function over fashion, you can still try to make your house as nice and beautiful looking as possible. You shouldn’t completely neglect the curb appeal of the home if you’re shooting to make your house into a place where families who are caring for aging family members can thrive. If the siding of the home is drab and uninviting, it could still pay to renovate the exterior of the house so it’s more exciting for future homeowners to envision themselves pulling into the driveway of the home and living there.
What’s more, you should attend to any maintenance needs that may seem like they are putting the looks of the place over the functionality of different features of the property such as giving the home a new paint job on the inside and outside of the place. You may also want to think about whether you could use the process of renovating the home to accommodate accessibility needs as an opportunity to make the home look better to potential buyers. For example, if you need to install a ramp, you could choose a material that is not only functional but also attractive according to current trends.
Additionally, you can schedule contracting jobs that will benefit the home on a functional level at the same time as you’re scheduling jobs that benefit the home on an aesthetic level so you’re essentially knocking out two tasks at the same time. As the roofers are installing a new roof or replacing shingles, the painters can complete work on the inside of the home to paint over plain gray walls and replace them with bright white or inviting cream ones.
As you’re trying to sell your grey split level house, remember that everyone has different tastes. Some potential homeowners may look at your house and love the fact that it’s not too flashy or outlandish. When your home doesn’t stand out from the crowd, it can offer potential homebuyers some added perks. Firstly, they’ll have a blank canvas to reflect their dream home design through renovations and home improvement projects over the years. It’s much easier to paint over a gray base on a home than to try to repaint a fire truck red house.
Additionally, they may appreciate the subtle sensibilities of the home and keep it the way it is with a minimalistic design approach. Just because you don’t love your gray house doesn’t mean someone else won’t. Also, even if your house doesn’t stand out to the crowd initially, you can add features that will hook potential buyers and elbow out the competition without having to make your home a glittery work of art in the process.
