How to decorate for rental

SunnyBunny

Hi

I'm buying my late parents Victorian house in London (with my sister). Needless to say some of the walls have seen better days. We intend to do up the house a bit and then rent out - selling maybe in 3 years. My dilemma is this, should we spend the £ now, replaster walls in about 3/4 rooms or just patch up and repaper then paint and save the money for the kitchen which we have to re-do, ie new units, electrics etc.

Any advice would be appreciated.

SB

amboy

Depends who you have in mind to rent, how big is property?

I personally would not replaster walls yet unless they are very bad, cracks can be sorted by yourselves just v out and fill then paper.

The money spent in the kitchen will see the biggest rewards in terms of potential tenants will appreciate this more

abbecer

If you can get the house to a good standard without doing major work i would. Hopefully not but you could end up with bad tenants who don't look after the house. I would spend the money only when really neccessary.

Rebecca x

Took_Me_Away

Personally from a renting point of view (which i do) Leave some colour on the walls all these landlords seem obsessed by bloody magnolia. But the kitchen is far more important IMO

silvercar

Took_Me_Away wrote:

Personally from a renting point of view (which i do) Leave some colour on the walls all these landlords seem obsessed by bloody magnolia. But the kitchen is far more important IMO

Just bought my first rental house (by default, but that's another story). The rooms were quite colourful and the kitchen was painted royal blue on 2 walls. The first thing the tenant did was ask me to paint the downstairs. She chose the colour and after days of indecision over different shades of white she chose magnolia!

SunnyBunny

Thanks all. I am pretty much going to go with the white scheme in the kitchen/dining room and maybe add some colour on one wall in bedrooms. It's a large house so I should be able to take some colour and I am so sick of seeing magnolia on every EA website.

tawnyowls

It isn't a case of either magnolia or a really dark jewel colour anyway. A lot of the pastels (especially the "hint of a tint") ones are just as neutral as magnolia, but give a little bit of colour. Even Ann Maurice, the Maharana of Magnolia, has unbent in recent years and taken to using pastels.