Selling Homes with Amanda Lamb

seven-day-weekend

We've just put our house up for sale and the EA said it was lovely and we didn't need to do anything to it.

Main two downstairs rooms are green and cream, kitchen is a very pale coffee, bathroom ditto, one bedroom is pale grey, one pale green and one totally white. The main sitting room has a very stylish green and gold feature wall. We have no family photographs, a few nice original pictures and lots of plants. It's a Victorian house and still has some original features.

However, I think each house needs to look right for its style and period, so what suits one may not necessarily suit another,

Waterlily24

yamsteroo wrote: »

I'm looking for a house at the moment and if I'm honest, the whole colour scheme thing doesn't really bother me.


Fair enough, if a room is painted completely black I'd maybe think about offering a bit less as it would cost me more in paint and my time to get rid of it but it wouldn't put me off buying it as long as the rest of the house is structurally sound, is the right price, in the right area and otherwise meets my needs.


I'm pretty sure that within the first month I'll have started decorating anyway regardless of colour or d!cor condition as I want to make the house my home - am I alone in this way of thinking?


When I watch some of the property shows, ok there are some right dumps where you can't see how big a room is for all the junk wedged into it, but there are others and they seem to be encouraging people to pretty much makeover their house for someone else to move into ... and probably makeover again.


Is it really worth the expense or do people not actually look beyond the colour of a room or the type of furniture in it?


I sometimes think we get too hung up on what we're TOLD we need to do to sell a house.

I agree with you, all but one of the houses we've bought have been dumps lol, one wasn't even mortgagable but we moved in and made them into lovely homes. Mind you we did most of the work in them ourselves.

WeAreGhosts

did anyone see last night's episode?

that green the couple painted in the hallway was awful, but what made it worse was the strange collection of boxes they put ornaments in! i thought they were going to put shoes in them, as that's what people would want in a hallway!

and the psychedelic wallpaper was AL's suggestion in the main bedroom - and then she laughed when the lady buyer didnt like it, as if she agreed with her!

the garden that was like a dump AL suggested stencils on the bare wall. she always suggest stencils never a bit of trellis and some plants! stencils always look a bit cheap imo.

sarah beeny was so much better at presenting the show. they should have ditched it when she left.

has AL got any background in property?

fairy_lights

WeAreGhosts wrote: »

the garden that was like a dump AL suggested stencils on the bare wall. she always suggest stencils never a bit of trellis and some plants! stencils always look a bit cheap imo.

I haven't seen last nights but might have to watch it on 4od, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure. I've seen her use stencils before and I find it so bizarre, does anyone this side of 1994 seriously think stencils are still a good look?
I don't know if AL has any background in property but she's certainly not an interior designer, and it shows.

BritAbroad

I've seen some really clever stencilling over the past couple of years, in very high-end show homes ($1m+). It's always been indoors though, never outside!

It's interesting to see how trends vary from one place to another. A big thing over here is darker ceilings, or tray ceilings. A lot of houses here have very high living room ceilings though so you can do something spectacular. My own house has very high ceilings which are sadly extremely boring just now. We're planning on overhauling the living room though so hopefully that will change.

When house shopping here I used to hate seeing neutral because it meant every room was exactly the same, uninspiring, with one of two types of carpet and brass light fittings and taps everywhere. Yet in the UK, when looking for my last house, neutral could definitely be exciting. (Another Natural Hessian fan here).

Over here a lot of houses go for very dingy colours - muddy browns and greens. And almost every house built in the nineties has a horrible orangey-oak kitchen. I got very excited at one house we viewed that had a black living room - it looked amazing. We are gradually renovating our house and modernising it but it's a lot of work and expensive. I'm also wary of going too British as it might make it hard to sell.

I've not seen Amanda Lamb's programme - sounds like she's a bit of a reverse House Doctor!

Anatidaephobia

I actually liked the green hallway in the recent episode although those crates were a bit odd. I hated the feature wallpaper in the master bedroom and the headboard wasn't much better. I don't know why they insisted on such a dark wall in the smaller bedroom either, it made that room so dark! And the stencils in the other house were awful...

Some of the changes Amanda Lamb suggests - mainly the decluttering - are obviously good but so many others seem like it's completely unrelated to selling a house; they just want to do something different for the sake of the show.

The whole concept of the show is weird, tbh. Three houses but only one buyer. The aim of the show is to leave two houses unsold! I don't know why they don't have more potential buyers or an open day like in Phil Spencer Secret Agent. Amanda Lamb annoys me a bit; she makes some very amateurish/odd comments when she shows the buyer round... "I know it's tiny!" "no students allowed in this house!" etc

princeofpounds

has AL got any background in property?

I think she was the Scottish Widows model for a while, then presented on a property show a lot.

So about as qualified as the average estate agent.

115K

Oh I didn't realise she was the Scottish Widows woman but I thought she looked familiar when I first saw her.:D

Anatidaephobia wrote: »

When I was viewing houses, I liked the houses that had plain white/cream walls and then the colour in the room was created by things like curtains, rugs, paintings, furniture, cushions, etc. It gave colour and warmth to a room but still leaves the buyer with a blank canvas.

Dark colours and interesting decor didn't put me off but it did make me think "oh I'd have to change everything".

Unless the house has only literally just being redecorated and to a good enough standard that I don't need to do it again, I will paint it myself so I appreciated the houses that had pale colours on the walls because that meant it would take fewer coats of paint. I also preferred houses without wallpaper as that saved me the hassle of stripping it. That's just my preference though.

I agree!:)

I'm looking at houses online at the moment and the ones that are dark, cluttered and have garish decoration do put me off. I know you need to imagine it without all that but the more light, neutral and uncluttered the better a house looks IMO.

homestager wrote: »

.

If you want to watch a show with good, sensible advice for sellers, watch Phil Spencer: Secret Agent instead.

He obviously knows what he is talking about. I like his advice too.

richy999 wrote: »

Sorry, rant not quite over...

Are the homeowners on Phil Spencer: Secret Agent paid to churn out the line… no I’ve really no idea why my house has been on the market for 12 months!

Que a house interior that is a cross between a jumble sale and an episode of Britain’s Worst DIYer.

Lol.:rotfl:

Anatidaephobia

princeofpounds wrote: »

I think she was the Scottish Widows model for a while, then presented on a property show a lot.

So about as qualified as the average estate agent.

According to Wikipedia, she used to be an estate agent.