Selecting a Color Palette For Your Home
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How To Select Paint And Other Finishes For Your Home
Now that we are about mid-way through the construction of our home, we are making decisions left and right on colors and finishes. I recently detailed our experience selecting kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, which was a whirlwind of decisions all at once. This is definitely the fun part of new home design!
One thing that you want to do when selecting a color palette for your home is to look at samples and paint chips in your house and IN the rooms that you plan to use them in. This is so the natural light will hit each color and you can get a better idea about how the real deal will look once used in your house. We did this both in the morning and the night since the lighting will be different during each day part.
Look At Paint Samples In Natural Light
After you select paint colors based on looking at paint chips samples in each room, be sure to get samples of paint and then put it up on the wall. You are going to want to be sure to do two coats so that you can see what the finished color will look like.
A friend of mine recently opened up her new art studio shop, called Ink Reel Art Studio. Ashley creates beautiful one-of-a-kind original Alcohol Ink Paintings. I am obsessed with her work! They are unlike anything that I have seen, and I cannot wait to hang this gorgeous abstract original in our son's room. I used one of her painting as inspiration for our color palette.
Selecting colors for your home is not limited to paint. There are often many other finishes that you may be looking at incorporating into your home design. For our kitchen sink finish, we were torn between two colors in two different finishes - Ricotta and Parchment in a quartz and a fireclay material. The Parchment is slightly more off-white than the ricotta.
After looking at the samples several times in our kitchen space, we decided that the Ricotta Quartz was the winning color and finish. It can be tough to envision what an entire sink will look like, but comparing samples side by side in a given room will help you greatly to nail down a decision.
For our kitchen cabinets, we had three different shades of white to choose from. When looked at side-by-side in our kitchen space, it was easy to see that two of the samples had a yellow hue to them. I loved the way these colors looked while in the cabinet showroom, but once in our space, it was evident that we need to go with a crisp decora white instead of a white dove color.
The biggest lesson that I learned while building our house is to never paint your own house (unless you are a skilled painter, of course!). We tried this to save money, and it backfired. After spending so much time selecting paint, and then painting the second floor ourselves, we decided it looked terrible and then had to hire last-minute painters. It was a costly lesson that I will never forget.
Painting is a skill. It is not for the unexperienced to handle. When choosing paint colors, don’t be afraid of using bold colors in certain rooms. Paint is one of the easiest and least expensive aspects of your home that you can change, so if you do end up selecting the wrong color for your home, you can always fix it later.
We ended up going with a fairly neutral paint color palette for our house. We incorporated a few rose colors, off-whites, grays, and greens. In the end, I do not have any paint regret (other that the fact that we tried to pain out entire home ourselves at first!). Good luck in selecting colors for your home, and have fun with it!
