Choosing paint colours for your house can be as fun as it can be tedious. Coming to a compromise with others as to the look and feel of the home you want to make can take years but once your home is created, life becomes that little bit more sweet. One of the essential parts of making a house a home is the choosing the colour of the walls. You have to look at them day in, day out so it is necessary to paint them a colour you love. If the walls are the wrong colour for you, it can impact on your mood and can even stop you from relaxing comfortably in the room you would love to lounge around in. Colours can effortlessly make or break a home.

It is important to strike a balance between the fun and quirky child in you that wants bright pinks, purples, yellows, blues, greens and all the colours of the rainbow splattered everywhere and the staid but sophisticated adult that has to relate to others who prefers only white or the latest fashionable colour. When you were a kid or even when you first started dating, there was one question that kept cropping up. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ someone would ask and the answer was always an immediate ‘blue’ or ‘purple’ or ‘pink’; whichever colour you most identified with. Blue was strong and rough. Purple was more girly but still strong and said you were more independent. Pink was girly and denoted frills, pigtails and horses. These colours can be fun to introduce into a home but please make sure the person also living in your rooms is a fan of pink frills or rough strong blues. Colours are more personal than they originally seem when you set out to choose them. When an argument ensues about a colour, it is likely that you are dealing with an opposite personality streak. Find something you have in common and work from there. Leave the staid and fashionable behind as this is only good for producing a saleable house, ready for auction.

In choosing your colours keep in mind that there are many different ways of painting a house. Spot colour, full colour, stripes, patterns and textures can all be appealing and relaxing if chosen carefully and if it reflects what you like. Find out will suit you best by checking out friends’ and family’s homes as well as the glossy magazine pictures. The types of people you like to hang around often have a similar taste in painting styles even if the colour is not to your liking.

Colour wheels, swatches and even the colour of your furniture or the pictures hanging on your walls will help you choose the colours best suited to you. Making sure each room moves gently on from the next can be done by choosing 3 colours and sticking to only them, by choosing a range of complimentary colours, or by choosing to only introduce coloured patches onto white at intervals. Using opposite colours will make a bold statement but these colour schemes almost need to be broken up by a neutral tone to ensure a headache doesn’t occur each time you see the paint work. That said, for the strong at heart and unflinching of eye, this might just make you grin wildly every time you see it, in which case this could be perfect for you.

Make the colours lead you through the house, from the general living areas to the play areas and bedrooms. Any room where significant time is spent in it needs to be perfect for the person occupying it. Living and entertainment areas need to be acceptable to friends, family and strangers as well as yourself. That way you can always hold a party or movie night without your guests wincing at the bright blue and yellow walls. In the areas of the house you don’t generally invite others into but you spend most of your home life in make sure that it reflects your character/s.

Another point to address is that although you might like a solid dark colour it will only suit large rooms. You will likely have to compromise on the colour of a small room if bold colour is your favourite way of painting. Keep it light but strong so that the space feels larger and you are happy being in that room.
Good luck and happy painting.