Unless your closets have natural light or are very well lit (and, probably, walk-in closets), I think they will look dingy if painted the wall colors of the bedrooms. Keep them white. Builder's white is not a nice white, however, so I'd find a bright, fresh white. When I staged our house to sell, doing the closets was part of the process. Of course this added to the workload. But I did it anyway. In the case of the wall of large, deep closets in the master bedroom, all I did was seriously declutter them -- removed a very large percentage of the hanging clothes, got matching hangers for the ones that were to remain, and hung those clothes neatly, evenly spaced, and by type and color. I also vacuumed out the closets, including the floors. In the case of a large walk-in closet, I did the same + organized the shelves above the clothes rods. The reason for limiting the work for this closet was that there was no light in it, so new, fresh paint probably would not have been noticeable. But also, the closet wasn't used much, so the older paint job still looked quite good. If there were dings or scuff marks, I'm sure I touched them up. Also, this closet's floors had always been in very bad shape. We had never planned to have those refinished and certainly were not going to do so to sell the house. So I found small rugs that covered the entire floor almost perfectly. Note that the rugs were removable, so potential buyers could see the condition of the floors if they wanted. (No permanent hiding of flaws and no preventing buyers from looking wherever they wanted to!) However, in the case of smaller closets in other bedrooms, I emptied them completely, repainted walls and ceilings in a bright, fresh white (after a real and thorough prep that included ensuring the walls were clean & ready for painting) and replaced only about 1 percent of what had been in them. One closet contained only a neutral off-white canvas clothes storage bag (with a few items in it) and, on the storage shelf above it, a few attractive baskets covered in blue & white material with a few odds & ends in them. The blue & white fit with that room's color scheme. The other bedroom closet contained a very small number of pieces hung on attractive hangers. I probably left something attractive on the shelf. Knowing me, it would have been something that (1) would typically be stored in a bedroom closet and (2) went with that room's color scheme. The point was to let potential buyers see how much storage space was available in this house -- and how attractive and usable it was. Oh, and we had a small closet on the first floor next to the coat closet. The former owner had done a DIY job by putting in cheap particle board shelves. At one point when living there I'd painted them a bright white. But then they looked just like...cheap particle board painted bright white. So I found attractive, inexpensive fabric that coordinated well with our living room stuff and covered each shelf with the stuff. That little, formerly ugly closet looked really good. Notice that, to have closets coordinate with their rooms, I used baskets (and other items) rather than painted the closets themselves. Finally, there was NOTHING on the floor of any closet with the exception of a few shoe racks -- again, with just a few, carefully chosen shoes in them. The workload? If you include all the closets in the house -- and there were a lot of them -- it was enormous. But the house was a Victorian, the majority of which typically lack closet space. So I was showing off a real asset. Actually, I'd have done it regardless, as everybody talks of needing storage space.... Closets are an asset. I realize this is a very long response to your question. For me, at the time, attic to basement staging worked out amazingly well. Whether it would today, in this market, is another question. Maybe such an effort would be pointless, I don't know. But I'd do it again anyway -- anything to make the house look as good as it could.

ditto vcheethi -- I painted our master bedroom walkin a nice beigey tan (like Tobacco Road) back when I was planning to do the same color in the master bedroom. We were painting the closet first, so we could install a closet organizer system. Well, it took a few years to get around to the bedroom and I went in a totally different direction - sort of a bright apple green with white trim. Now the closet (which, since it's a walkin, is really like another room) looks drab and dingy. I want to paint it white, but it's going to be such a pain to work around all the shelving and closet organizer stuff. My dh gives me "that look" every time I mention painting the closet. (And truthfully, there are about a million other things that need to be painted more than the closet, so he does have a point.) But I wish I had just stayed with white.

If you don't have stained wood doors, then you have painted doors? If so, then you can paint the inside of the front door the color of your other painted doors, or you can paint it the color of the walls. Either would be acceptable and cool.

Thank you everyone! I’m going to go with painting the inside white. With having kids, that’s a good point about possibly changing the wall color down the road, and it would be good to eliminate needing to do the closets again. The closets don’t have doors because we bought the property from someone we knew “as is”, and the doors that were on them were broken and needed replacing. He also had a ton of house projects that he left unfinished, or did wrong (including a half bath that we had to rip out because he didn’t get a permit for the work, and also botched the plumbing) so we’re in the process of ripping stuff out.