Many people love color, but live with plain white or tan walls for many years for one simple, easy-to-overcome reason: fear. When they need to choose a paint color, they often fall back on “safe” choices.
The fear that you’ll choose a paint color that’s “wrong” and having to live with walls in the bedroom, family room, kitchen, den or bathroom that aren’t quite right, or the fear of having to repaint when that happens.
Why are people afraid to choose a paint color for interior rooms in their own home? Because painting rooms in your house is real work, and because once you do it, you want the results to measure up to your expectations and desires, and you definitely don’t want to have to do it all over again if you found you chose a paint color you simply can’t live with.
The good news is there are many resources out there that can take the guesswork out, so you can confidently choose a paint color for interior walls, whether you want to paint one or more rooms just one color or you want to mix it up and choose different colors for different rooms or accent walls in your home.
You don’t have to be afraid of choosing the wrong color to paint your house. You don’t have to be afraid of mixing and matching colors when it comes to choosing paint colors for your house. And you don’t have to be afraid of ending up with a house that doesn’t feel like its colors are tied together in harmony with one another.
Autumn: The Ultimate Fashion Color Display to Help You Choose a Paint Color for Your Walls
HGTV.com shares these 7 great tips for choosing paint colors for your home, avoiding common mistakes and even tips on how to visually tie rooms together, even if they are painted different colors:
- Know the basics
- Pick the right shade
- Accessorize with color
- Try a new palette
- Add color to small spaces
- Create a mood
- Connect rooms with color
One of the best ways to connect all of the rooms in your home with color is something that we’ve already done for our homeowners. All of the houses built by Soundbuilt Homes have white mill work along baseboards and have beautiful white window trims, sills and aprons to keep the eye moving with white accents. It serves an addition purpose in creating cohesion so that you’re free to express your personality in custom wall colors, wallpaper and other coverings.
In addition, we often carry our surfaces over from room to room as well, such as putting the same tile or granite around the fireplace in your great room as you have on your kitchen counter top or back splash. Even the cabinetry we build into your kitchen, great room and bathrooms helps to provide continuity, regardless of what colors you ultimately choose to paint the walls of your home.
This is just one of hundreds of decisions that we make when we build a new home or a community of new homes in King, Pierce or Thurston County for aesthetic reasons. We don’t just think about construction or cost when we build new houses for northwest home buyers. We put more than decades of knowledge about what Pacific Northwest home buyers want in their new home into each and every new home we build!
And beyond that, most of the major paint manufacturers carried in hardware stores throughout the US have websites with painting guides, color choosing helpers, photos and videos with ideas and inspiration and checklists for what supplies you’ll need when you paint.
For instance, the paint experts at Sherwin-Williams.com provide great tips for not only choosing colors for walls, but for ceilings and floors as well, and tells you what some of the pros and cons are of painting ceilings, walls or floors in various colors.
And at Lowes.com you’ll learn more about the color wheel and how to choose, order, mix and match paint colors for your home.
Ultimately this Lowes.com article says something that I think is very important when it comes to choosing paint colors for your own home, and it’s this: Choose colors you like best.
The truth is, there are no “right colors” and no “wrong colors” when it comes to choosing paint, décor and accessories for your own home. The real trick in decorating lies in how you use those colors together to set a stage, create a mood, show off your prized possessions or create a wonderful home for your loved ones.
All that said, we’d like to point to the colors provided by nature during Autumn in the northern hemisphere, and especially in the US, as inspiration for those looking for a great color palette when it comes to choosing paint colors for their home in 2012.
While you might expect the reds, yellows and oranges one usually associates with Autumn leaves as leaves change color from summer to fall. But as the photo shown here aptly demonstrates, these colors can be beautifully accented by greens and charcoal grays and browns as well.
We found a beautiful paint palette by Sherwin Williams with colors that speak to the most popular colors for fall. When you see them all together, it’s easy to imagine how you might use one, two or even several of them within your home to set a mood and create a beautiful place for your friends and loved ones to gather!
And one last point to make. If you are still hesitant to cover a whole wall with a color that might be overpowering in large scale, remember that you can bring these colors into your home using art, accessories, throw pillows, lamps, bedding and much more.