Summer is right around the corner and many of you may be thinking it’s time for a home makeover. The easiest home refresh… is paint. Whether you do-it-yourself or hire a professional, painting is one the most inexpensive ways to give your home a facelift. It’s like the compliment you want someone saying after a great night’s sleep, “I can’t put my finger on it, but she looks fantastic”. That kind of facelift.
Many of our clients struggle with paint choice. It seems as though
it would be so simple to walk into a store, pick out your favorite
shade, and slap it on your walls. However, paint has proven to be quite
more complex than that. With undertones, lighting, furniture,
flooring, and space playing a vital role in how you choose the best
color, where do you begin?
First, let’s squash the BIGGEST misconception in paint etiquette. You can’t walk into your friend’s neighbor’s brother’s house, ask what color is on the walls, and then put it in your home and it’s perfect. Maybe…but rarely ever. Paint is like your youngest child of three (I speak with personal experience), picky about everything, doesn’t listen to what you want, and changes personalities morning, noon, and night. What I mean is: you must sample paint on your walls FIRST. It needs to be put in several places in the area you plan to paint and you need to check on it… morning, noon, and night. Why? Because every home offers different lighting; maybe you have more windows, maybe you don’t, maybe you have a small space, or maybe you have some existing paint color on the wall that will change the color you plan to put up. So many factors can play into the way paint color looks on your walls. Trust me, you don’t want to paint or pay for a painter to do your entire home and then hate it. That’s when paint becomes an expensive facelift. That’s when the compliment becomes “Man, she put on a lot of makeup today, but she still looks tired”. Don’t be that home.
We help our clients through this process, but if for some reason you don’t have a designer’s help, take your top five suggestions, get samples, and start painting away in different areas. Don’t put up more than five samples at a time. And remember that if you love the tone of a color, your local paint store can lighten or darken that color by different percentages!
Here’s a list of our top five paint colors currently in our clients’ homes: Sculptor Clay- Behr, Revere Pewter- Benjamin Moore, Shiitake- Sherwin Williams, Accessible Beige- Sherwin Williams, Repose Gray- Sherwin Williams.
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