Great Tips for Choosing The Perfect Paint Color

When your life feels like black and white....make sure that you dream in color.
                                                                                              ~Unknown

Have you ever spent the time and the money to paint a room and then afterwards hated it and thought to yourself "What was I thinking?"  I sure have; and those "experts" who say it's just paint, well what about all the time spent and the cost of the paint!  If you go with a decent or very good brand of paint, you know they cost plenty today...

Years ago, I painted a spare room a blue and the kids nicknamed it "The Smurf Room".  Ha, ha...

Through the years I've picked up some great tips for choosing the perfect paint color for your room which I'm sharing with you today.  

1. First and foremost, have patience!  Don't rush out and buy a gallon or two of paint just to get the job done.  From the moment I decide we're going to paint a room to actually buying it, may take weeks to find that perfect shade.
2. Don't go to a paint store, look at some colors under their lighting and decide what you're going to buy.  Color can look very different in one location than another and in different lighting.  You want to see how it will look in your house and your room.
3. Go to the paint store and grab those color strips.  I guarantee that they'll look very different in your room than they do in the store.  
4. Tape these strips to your wall and look at them from a distance.  The light in the room will make the color look different from one wall to another.  Look at them at different times of the day, and move them around from one wall to another.  When Mr. Cottage and I were looking at dark blue for an accent wall in our living room, we saw some popular shades of blue that looked black at night and we didn't want that.
5. Start the process of elimination.  As you look at your samples, try squinting your eyes and move around the room to see it from different angles.  Squinting actually works, believe it or not.  If you don't like a certain color, now that you see it in the room, remove it from the wall.  If you're not sure or hesitate, remove it. 
6. Don't assume that the color you saw on your friend's wall will look the same in your house. Every house, room and wall will be different.  The same is true for names of colors that you hear everyone is using in their houses.  Gray is very popular and when I decided to paint our family room a few years back, I brought some of these popular paint cards home only to have them show a green or purple cast.
7. Be aware of undertones in the colors.  Some of you who follow me, know that I painted our large room in our lower level.  When we bought our new house, the wall looked like off white, but after we moved in, we noticed the pink undertone.  Some people love that, obviously, but Mr. Cottage and I didn't like that pinkish look.
8. Get larger paint card samples and/or buy a few sample jars of the colors you're zeroing in on.  Many of the good paint stores offer larger sized paint cards you can borrow.  If you do the latter, you can paint it on your walls, but I bought some poster boards and painted the samples on that.  Then I could move it around from wall to wall and different times during the day.
9. As your paint dries, it will darken.  Keep this in mind when choosing your color.  
10. A little bit of saturation will go a long ways..That yellow you loved, may look really bright and harsh to your eyes once it's on all your walls.  You don't want to be wearing sunglasses inside your house.  Or that bright red you want for your accent wall, will look brighter than bright once it's painted on your wall.  So keep all this in mind in choosing your color.

Just another little tip...IF you decide to use the paint manufacturer's website to look at color, keep in mind that your computer's monitor will more than likely have a different tone to the color.  Every monitor shows color differently, so do NOT rely on this for choosing your paint color.  Use it only to help you zero into the color family you might want to use...

Take into account your adjoining rooms.  You don't want your colors to clash.  If you're making a big color change in one room that's right next to another, try to bring in accent colors from the other room to try and make them blend...

FYI, the red that we used to paint the wall above took only ONE coat of paint with NO priming.  We used a great brand of paint and bought the best.  It was worth every penny and 
it will pay off in the end.  Don't be a tightwad and buy the cheapest paint.  In the end you might regret it.

Just remember, PATIENCE, PATIENCE, PATIENCE!

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