Pastel Colors: Good or Bad for Staging Your Home?

When you think of pastel colors, do you envision sickeningly sweet pinks, lackluster yellows, and hospital room greens?

That kind if thinking is so yesterday. Pastels can be just the ticket not only for home staging, but for home decorating in general.

But only if used in the right way.

In order for pastels to flatter your staged rooms, they need to be the background and secondary colors. Not scattered through the room as accents.

By definition, a pastel color is any color mixed with white. Think soft blues, delicious peach, smokey lavender, creamy yellow, dusty greens, and sea glass shades of teal.

If you had to choose one word to describe the effect of pastel colors in home décor, the word would be “soothing.”

Sure, you want to wow home buyers visiting your home for sale, but you don’t want to blow them away with highly saturated, vivid colors that might night be their first choice.

Need more reasons to paint some walls or furniture pastel tones in preparation for the spring home buying season? Or for refreshing your window treatments, laying down an area rug, buying bedding, or recovering some chair seats that cash in on pastels' appeal? 

Pastel-toned furnishings are less likely to fight with each other for attention,
and accessorizing them is a no-brainer. Photo: diadapolenta.com.

You can easily build a color scheme around various shades of one or two pastel colors,
as in this lavender and blue room. Photo: housetohome.

Eight Reasons to Love 'Em.

• Pastels are more benign than bright colors. They’re less likely to offend buyers because they are never garish.
• Pastels are comforting and relaxing. They’ll encourage buyers to slow down and linger.
• Pastels are not distracting. They make it easy for buyers to appreciate your home’s important qualities, like layout, flooring, room size, focal points and other features.
• Pastels are cheerful colors. They are reminders of happy celebrations like birthdays, showers, weddings, and springtime holidays.
• Pastels combine well with accents of brighter colors, with wood tones, with white, and with touches of black that give definition to a room.
• Pastels are appropriate for almost every décor style. They're at home in rooms decorated in Contemporary, Colonial, Asian, French, Scandinavian, Shabby Chic, and any combination of styles.   
• Pastel colors are easy to paint over. If your home’s new owners want to choose their own colors, pastels are more likely to need only one coat of paint rather than two.
• Pastels look fresh. They build confidence in the buyer's mind because they "feel clean." 

Do you have some pastel colors in your home on the market? Pastels aren't perfect for accent colors, but they can be the perfect background and middle color of any room. Keep the entire room in a pastel scheme, and you'll look stylish and well-staged. 

Want more advice on staging your home? Download my eBook, DIY Home Staging Tips to Sell Your Home Fast and for Top Dollar. You can access it immediately, for just $5, and it comes with my money back guarantee.  

top photo: Ana Antunes. Tria Giovan photography.