How to Choose Paint Colors for Your Home Like a Pro
Have you always found it difficult to choose paint colors? Have you had to repaint a room because the paint color you chose didn't look at all the way you envisioned it to? Choosing the wrong paint color is a common decorating mistake that people make. However, it doesn't have to always be a mistake every time you visit your local hardware store.
In this article, we will provide helpful tips to choosing the right paint colors for your beautiful Forgotten Coast of Florida home.
1. Opt Not to Choose the Paint Color First
It can seem a bit backwards, but we recommend not choosing the paint first hand. If you feel like you should go and choose the paint color first, as it will take up the most space within a room, you will find it is easier to choose one of the thousands of paint colors to go with other things in your home than to choose a color that only goes with a few things, such as a rug or furniture. We recommend always choosing big things first, like flooring, the furniture, area rugs, curtains, and even art before the paint color.
2. Educate Yourself About Undertones
Our second tip in this article is to educate yourself about the undertones and color temperatures in paint. Paint is made up of a whole bunch of other colors. If you have ever watched professionals mix paint at the store, you can see all the different colors of paint being dripped into the can. These help to create undertones or color temperatures.
- A warm paint will feature undertones of warmer colors, such as red or yellow.
- A cool paint will feature understones of cooler colors, such as green, blue, or gray.
You can always opt to test the undertone of a paint color in two ways, including the following:
- Place a few swatches of the color on a white piece of printer paper and see what color is more visible to you.
- If you place a few swatches on a piece of paper, look at the bottom color, as it will be more saturated and will show the true color undertones.
3. Don't Choose Your Paint Color at the Store
Our third tip is to not choose your paint color while at the store. When you are at your general paint hardware store, you are looking at the colors under fluorescent lighting, which is harsh and glaring, and different than if you are to bring the paint color to your home. The way the lighting is will change the appearance of the paint to your eyes in the store, and how you will see those undertones. The paint color that you chose at the store won't look the same once you get it into your home, so never choose the paint color when you are at the store.
4. Utilize an Inspiration Piece
Our fourth tip for choosing paint colors is to try to incorporate an inspiration piece. A great decorating hack, especially for beginners, is to choose colors for your home that you have pulled from an inspiration piece. This can be a piece of fabric you are going to be using in a room in your home, bedding you are planning on using in a room, an area rug, or a piece of art. When you are pulling colors from an inspirational piece, you know that they will coordinate with everything else in the room. This is true especially when it comes to paint color, so try to pull a paint color out of an inspiration piece.
5. Use a Big Test Swatch
Our fifth tip for choosing a paint color is to use the largest test swatch possible and test at home with accurate lighting. Pick up one of the biggest swatches that you can at your general paint hardware store, or get sample size testers and paint them onto a Bristol board and put them on your wall in the desired room you will be painting. With your large paint swatches or painted Bristol board, look at the large samples in all kinds of different lights. Move them around the room if you need to see what they will look like on different walls and how they look in your space. Lighting in the room, including lamps, ceiling lights, and natural light, will change how paint swatches look at different times of the day. We recommend living with those swatches for a few days in all light to see if you like that color.
Bottom Line
Choosing a paint color can almost be as nerve-wracking as choosing the home of your dreams. There are a few things that can go wrong, but if you follow this article as use it as a guide to choosing your desired paint color, no issues should arise. Whether you are refreshing your home to make it feel more new, or you are looking to repaint to give your home a facelift before selling, we got you covered. Trust the local professionals at Coastal Realty Group to guide you in finding and settling down in the home of your dreams in the many beautiful waterfront properties that make up the Forgotten Coast of Florida, today.
