Choosing Paint Colors

"Read these tips on choosing paint colors the right way! "

The range of colors is infinite, and paint allows you to be adventurous and creative in your choices.

Getting the perfect color for your walls and matching it with the rest of the house: furniture, window treatments, rugs is possible without being a professional.

Following these simple steps will create the perfect matches for your wall decor and build your color confidence!

or...

not there yet?

Simple Steps to Build the Perfect Color Scheme

Decisions, decisions...

Discover your own decorating style - take the time to look through every decor magazine or book you can get your hands on; look on the internet for decorating theme websites.
Make notes, or clip out pages that appeal to you. make notes and put clips into a file; before long you will see a pattern emerging on what your personal style is.
Designer show house present another opportunity to get ideas from top professionals.

Draw a floor plan of the room - make note of the placement of windows, doors, fireplace. Then you can experiment with cutout shapes for furniture, to see traffic patterns and furniture placement.

Settle on a favourite fabric, wallcovering, rug - that is one of the easiest way to select a color scheme. Allow one color from the pattern to dominate the look, and choose one or two other for accents and complete the scheme.

Take a closer look at your furniture, window treatments, rugs, and make note which color might complement them.

Make note of how many colors you think you will use - You think that baseboards and trims will be the same color or a different one? Usually it is, unless the trim is in a bad shape and you want to mask some of its imperfections.

If possible make major purchases first - but first the furniture: sofas, armchairs, rugs, and then based on their style and colors, purchase the paint.

Before choosing paint colors determine the finish or sheen the paint will have.
As a rule of thumb, walls are painted using a flat or eggshell finish, ceiling in a flat finish, and trims get a semi-gloss or high gloss finish.

After you made your decision on chooosing paint colors - go to the paint store.They all can provide color samples. take them home and look in different types of light: natural, incandescent or fluorescent. Make note of the type of light you have in the room, and how much natural light the room gets during the day.

Paint the chosen color on a board - place it around the house to see it in different light and near furniture and rugs to see how it matches.

Paint always look darker when it dries - pick the paint that is two shades lighter than the one you had originally in mind.

Colors affect the way you perceive a room - warm colors like red, orange, yellow make the space look smaller. Cool colors like greens and blues appear to make the walls recede from you, so the space will appear bigger.
Another option to make the room appear larger is to use shades of white or a neutral color.

Choose the right color for trimwork - molding, trimwork around the doors, windows, baseboards, cornices offer a wonderful opporunity to add additional color to the room.
You can use a color in the same family with the one used for the walls. Make it a darker or a lighter shade.
Contrasting trimwork will frame the flat wall surfaces.

Ceiling paint colors - choose a flat finish for the ceiling. It will help hiding eventual imperfections or cracks, whereas a glass finish will highlight it.
A white painted ceiling makes the room appear larger.
A darker painted ceiling than the walls makes the room smaller and cozier.

Understanding colors, choosing paint colors, and working with them, will grow the confidence in yourself that you can do it, and soon enough you would want to use paint to transform tiles, furniture, and even floors.