Choosing Paint Colours

As soon as we knew we were moving here, one of our friends suggested as they did, have a professional painter come in and paint everything neutral. Well, we actually like some of the colours so decided against this. However, I have always maintained that you should not immediately change paint colours upon moving into a new home. Get settled first then observe how the natural light affects the room colours. Chances are the nice creamy yellow in the kitchen was quite welcoming under artificial lighting when you viewed the house and now is a bit garish while sipping your morning coffee.

I spent a couple of days on the Behr ColorSmart site.  This is an amazing tool that can help you find the perfect colours and even shows you what they will look like using your own photo.  After finding a mossy green (Promenade, 400F-5) very close to what was used in the master bedroom and fairly close to one of the colours at our vacation home. All the other colours in the house will co-ordinate back to that green. My husband wanted to deal locally at Home Hardware but they don't sell Behr paint. Home Depot does but that means a good half hour drive each way that will waste a lot of time if I go on a per room basis. Anyway, Home Hardware can mix the paint to the Behr code so that is a real bonus for me!  It will save countless trips outside of our community.

Another great way to choose a colour for a room is to look at one of the fabrics you already have in there.  Squint and the predominate colour will pop out.  Take the fabric sample with you to start building of colours that will co-ordinate with that fabric.  I actually chose co-ordinating colours this way for our old house.  I loved the tone of the existing wallpaper but not the design or age of it.  The end result was quite pleasant to the point I ended up basing the entire house colours on that particular colour!  I even found a wallpaper border later with all the colours.  The neat thing was I had chose the colours for the walls using the squint method and the Behr ColorSmart tool well before I ever found the border and yet the border matched perfectly.  Sometimes working backwards still gets good end results!



Garden Gnome
©2006-2012