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ashley_abbott64

Picking Paint Is Hard To Do

8 years ago
I need help! How do you decide on the right color scheme and/or find colors that work together? I essentially need paint for every room in my house but am currently working on the master bedroom and bath. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Comments (4)

  • 8 years ago
    Choose colors that you love and wouldn't mind looking at everyday. Use pictures you find on Houzz and Pinterest for inspiration
  • 8 years ago

    Benjamin Moore has a tool that lets you combine paint colors in 'sample' rooms. Plus it suggests combinations.

    Sure that other paint brands have similar tools.

    Then you go get samples and paint them on a largish board and try in different lighting in your room. Consider your rugs, floors & furnishings. It is easier to select paint after you have your rugs/floors than the other way around.

    Look at bedroom photos on this website and just pick ones that catch your eye without overthinking. A trend may emerge that you can explore.

    All else fails, go with one my favorite colors: Benjamin Moore Palladian Blue



  • PRO
    8 years ago
    last modified: 8 years ago

    Paint colors on the walls are the LAST items chosen. Each room needs a cohesive design plan before you do anything. First, choose what you want the room to do, the function. Is it a sitting room? TV watching? entertaining? bedroom? dining? office? children's play area? Then do the furniture layout, on graph paper (1 square = 1 inch), paying attention to scale, balance, proportion and spacing. After this you need to select the style--French, Scandinavian, Moroccan, Asian? and the level of formality-rustic? country? formal? At that point you can select colors, patterns, materials, and a lighting plan, which is very important to the success of a room. You can select a color scheme by choosing your large items first--either a rug, a curtain pattern, a sofa, etc., and that will inform your preferred colors. Once you have all the items chosen, put them together on a sample board and start selecting your wall colors. Once you narrow the paint colors down to 2 or 3, paint them on large poster boards and move them around the room to make sure that they work in your room with your light, both daytime and nighttime.

    If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. That is why decorators and designers charge for their services. You may want to hire someone to at least help you get started. If you need to paint the entire house before you have a design plan in place, then just do white walls and trim. You can always paint over the white if you need to.

    Good luck with your project!

  • 8 years ago

    It seems to me that you are already living in this house? In which case you may already have some or all of your major furnishings and have decided on the functions of the various rooms. Assuming that is true, you would start the practical colour work at the 'sample board' stage Diana has mentioned above. (I must admit I wouldn't make a physical board for myself because taking the photographs of everything in good light would be such a schlep, and anyway I play with colours in my head a lot. But having done my equivalent of that stage I would certainly test potential colours against my existing furnishings and art before deciding.)

    Before that, however, I believe you need a good idea of what you want to achieve in terms of style and feel throughout the house -- which of course relate strongly to colour. Looking at your ideabook, I think you do, although more browsing, looking specifically for colour moods, would do no harm. And even if the master bedroom will be a different colour from the rest of the house it will need to work well with it. For instance, it looks as though you might want an interior with a lot of soft, creamy lightness to it. If so, the colours in this bedroom from your ideabook, with its light sage walls, would blend beautifully (as the cream bedding proves):

    American Dream Home 2012 · More Info

    Cautiousness might suggest that you go with cream tiles in the bathroom in a case like this, not green, because that would allow you or a later owner to change the bedroom colour with ease.


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