If picking one paint color is tricky, how on earth do you find colors for an entire house? How can you know they will go together? Where do you even begin?
Here a few strategies and ideas to keep in mind to help this process be as smooth as possible!
- First step is noting which rooms are visible to one another. Walk through your house and note which spaces you can see from each room. Use a floor plan to keep track.
- Start by picking a color for the biggest, most centrally located room. This will most likely be your living room or kitchen, and it’s a great place to start working on your whole-house palette.
- Start by picking a color for the biggest, most centrally located room.This will most likely be your living room or kitchen, and it’s a great place to start working on your whole-house palette.
- Have a strategy when picking colors for an open space. When much of the house is visible at once, as in a open plan space , picking colors that work together is especially important. Using shades or tints (shades are darker; tints are lighter) of the same hue can work well in this type of space.
- Work on upstairs and downstairs spaces separately.If there is a true separation between floors, you can easily create a different mood in the upstairs versus downstairs, rooted in the colors you choose. Focusing on one floor at a time can help keep the task feeling more manageable.
- Consider keeping connecting spaces neutral. White, beige, greigeand the like are fairly foolproof choices for halls and landings, and they give the eye a place to rest between areas of more saturated color.
- Test your potential palette.As you narrow down your color choices and think you may have some winners, bring home test pots of paint. Sample cards, even the big ones, can be deceptive.
- Pay attention to the impact of lighting. Color is a reflection of light, so the kind and amount of light in a room will have a significant impact on a color scheme. Experiment with how natural light or light from lamps or recessed fixtures affects color in fabrics, paint, furniture, and other surfaces.
- While neutrals might seem safe, there are many benefits to using color in your home. Color can unite disparate styles of furnishings. It is also useful for renewing worn or outdated furniture.
- Using color can also manipulate your sense of space. A small room can seem larger with light colors; a large room will shrink with a darker shade on the walls.