How To Pick Paint Colors For Your Home

Painting the interior of your home can be fun for the whole family, but you still want to make sure you do it right. Part of that is choosing the right colors that will look as good today as it will 5 or 10 years down the road. While this may sound relatively easy on the surface, if you have a growing family you might want to put a little more thought into it.

The exterior of your home is a bit easier to decide though so let us start there. When choosing an exterior color you should take a look at your neighborhood in general and the surrounding houses nearest yours in particular. The color of a home should match the personality of the homeowner as much as possible. While you want to give it your own personal touch you do not want to contrast it too much with your surroundings. Much like yourself you want it to blend in with your own personality without standing out too much.

For the interior of your home there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Look at your entire floor plan and the sizes of the rooms. A general rule of thumb to go by is that the larger the rooms are, the darker the colors should be. Conversely, the smaller the rooms the lighter the colors. Dark colors seem to have a minimizing effect on the space that it is on, so if you want a large room to appear smaller so you can give it that "cozy" feel, try something dark and in an earth tone. Brighter colors tend to add to the feel of spaciousness, so if you have small rooms that you want to feel more comfortable in then you will want a bright blue or yellow type theme.

As this is a starting point for choosing your colors, it is by no means something you need to strictly adhere to. The shade of a color is what you want to pay attention to when determining what will fit your home the best, but the color itself is what will ultimately add the personality that you are trying to create. If you have children that are still at a young age, then whatever color you choose for their room will want to be a color and shade that will be easy to change if the children outgrow what is initially put on. Lightly shaded colors are good for this purpose and you can mix it up a bit if you need to pay attention to the spacial aspect of the job as well.

For instance, if the room is bigger than desired then you can refresh the walls with a new coat of brown paint to help it look a bit smaller, but not with a shade so dark that it would be difficult to change at a later date.