Home Improvement: 4 Steps To Picking The Right Paint Color
A relatively inexpensive way to make a room look new again is to paint the walls a different color. I use the word relatively because while it’s certainly cheaper to paint a room than to replace the flooring or the furniture in it, at $40 or more a gallon paint can still be a significant expense. This is especially true when you aren’t happy with your initial color choice and have to buy a second or even third color.
By following these steps, you can reduce the risk of buying unnecessary expensive gallons of paint, and get the right color the first time:
Pick Out Color Samples
The first step is to go to a paint retailer and select paint sample squares of colors in the ballpark of what you’re looking for. You might even go to multiple retailers with different brand names of paint to get more samples.
Colors On The Wall
Tape the sample squares on the wall of the room to be painted so you can easily see them. Look at them for a few days. Make sure to note how they look at different times during the day to get a feeling for how each color looks with different light levels. Also, move the color samples around to different places within your room.
Paint Sample
Once you’ve decided on your favorite color, buy a small amount of paint in the color you’ve selected. Many times, this will be a quart (instead of a gallon), but some places may have even smaller containers. Paint a piece of the wall in several different places in the selected room. Again, look at the fresh color at different times of the day.
Repeat
If you aren’t satisfied with the color, go back and get more samples and repeat the process. Once you get a color you like, go forward with buying however many gallons of paint you need to complete your project.
Refreshing a room by painting it a new color can give it a completely new look. Picking the right color the first time can save time, money, and prevent frustration. By following these steps, you can pick the right color the first time, and more quickly get to the part of enjoying your freshly painted room.
How about you Clever Friends, have you ever started painting a room, and then decided the color was wrong? Do you have a process to selecting a paint color?
Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children, Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.
When my fiance and I remodeled our living room we took it all the way down to the studs. Before remodeling the room had dark chocolate brown walls, a light brown ceiling, beige trim, and no recessed lighting. After we put up new drywall and primed the walls I almost wanted to just leave it bright white because the room look so much bigger. When we painted the walls with sample of light grey that we liked it at the store it was like 10 shades darker than we liked. Needless to say 10 samples later we finally found the right one.