Are you living with boring white walls, but hate the thought of painting? Painting is often a task many home owners dread. However it is one of the most inexpensive ways to improve the look of your home without too much effort.
Paint colors can dramatically change the mood and interior design of your home. Paint can make a statement with splashes of bold color, or it can be a soft backdrop to a more muted interior.
If you ask me, painting is one of the easiest and least expensive tools in the interior design world. And picking the best colors for your home is one of the interesting part of the process. With so many hues to choose from, where does one even start?
There are several factors to consider before you paint- things that will make your job much easier:
• Lighting
Does your room get a tone of natural light? Or not so much? Paint a color that looks very different depending on the light. As far as dark colors go, they can read elegant and cozy in rooms with good, natural light but can easily read claustrophobic in rooms with little natural light. Get a sample, and paint a square on your wall, paying careful attention to how it changes in certain lights through the day.
• Adjacent rooms
With open concept layout being such a sought after floor plan these days, many homes have rooms that floor right into another. If there is a half wall, or any other framing that technically separates the space, you’ll need to decide if you want to paint both spaces the same color or choose a complementary color for the adjacent space. If you are keeping the space adjacent to the room you are painting the same color, you’ll want to make sure that existing color makes sense in your home’s color story. Otherwise the entire area could just look disjointed.
• The size of the room
One of the common misconceptions about painting a small room is that you should stick to white to create an illusion of more space. While it’s true that white can certainly create a sense of airiness in some spaces, many interior designers swear by choosing dark colors for a small room to blend its edges and camouflage the fact that it is indeed small.
Alternatively, dark colors in large rooms draw the room in, making it feel smaller and more cozy. Lighter colors enhance the feeling of openness.
• Your furnishings
Unless you’re buying brand new furnishings to go into your room after you’ve chosen your color, you’ll want to think about how the furnishings you have will correlate with the hue you choose. Opt for a paint shade much lighter or much darker that the elements in the space.
• What vibe you’re going for
One of the favorite things about painting is that it can feel so trans formative. Color psychology is a real thing, and it plays out with the paint colors you seek in your home. Pale and cool colors create a sense of serenity. Warm colors, especially red, raise a room’s energy level and are great for fostering conversation and sociability. Bright colors, like yellow, are happy but can be hard on the eyes and can elicit negative feelings in some people. And neutral can lend a sense of calm and refinement.
• The future
If you’re dying to paint your bathroom a deep navy blue, do it! When all is said and done, this is your home, and your paint colors should reflect your personality. But first, consider what the future holds for the space you’re painting. Do you plan to sell your home in the near future? Will the room be re-purposed down the road for a nursery?
Knowing you will have to start the entire painting process over again may steer you towards a lighter shade than you were originally considering, given it will be easier to paint over down the road.