How to Choose the Right Paint Color for Your Interior Rooms

So you’ve decided to paint some interior rooms of your home, and you’re so excited for the change. There’s nothing like fresh paint to make a room feel new! But...you need to choose your colors. And there are so many to choose from—endless possibilities. 

Where do you start? 

No one understands that feeling better than Paint Positive. We help our clients find the right color for their interior paint projects every day. It’s one of the reasons we offer free color consults!

In this post, we’re going to give away a few helpful methods for choosing the right color for your interior paint project. That way, you can search for the perfect color for every room with confidence.

Don’t choose a paint color first

This probably sounds counterintuitive, but you don’t want to start with the paint color. If it were that easy, you wouldn’t need to read a blog about it. Instead of looking through thousands of colors, try these starting points. 

Find inspiration on social media

Many people try to reinvent the wheel when they start a new project. Save yourself the hassle, and look for inspiration that you can emulate and make your own. 

Pinterest is a great way to find inspiration. With the simple search bar, you can find hundreds of images and save the ones you love to your customizable boards. Make a board for each of the rooms in your home that you plan to paint, and save the images you love. But don’t go overboard. Remember, the goal is to narrow down your options. 

If you’re not a social media user, you can do the same thing using interior decorating magazines. Cut out images you love and put them in a physical folder or scrapbook.

Find inspiration all around you

You don’t have to find a picture that portrays exactly what you want. You can find inspiration all around you. One way to find the perfect color is to look at your furniture and decor. When you make decisions to buy these objects, it’s usually in part because you like the colors. 

So maybe you have a beautiful sofa, for example, that you had to buy. And it’s the centerpiece of your living room. Perfect! Find some colors that complement that sofa. 

How much color is too much?

Many people will tell you to go neutral with your color choices. The more neutral the better. That can be true, but it’s not always the case. 

Think about color this way: different colors have different effects. Choose your colors based on your desired effect. For example, vibrant colors like bright oranges, yellows, reds, and blues create a sense of energy. Lighter, neutral colors generally create a sense of calm and relaxation. So which feeling are you hoping to achieve? 

Also, consider where you want to direct peoples’ attention when they enter a room. If you want that centerpiece sofa to stick out, then avoid drowning it out with powerful colors or patterns. Use more neutral colors to help draw attention to the stand-out sofa. The same technique will work when deciding which wall you’d like to make your accent wall. 

Test your colors

By now, you might have narrowed down your choices to a few colors. Before you start covering the walls, test the colors out on a few spots in the room. 

See how they look on one wall versus another, as well as during the morning, afternoon, and evening. You’ll want to see which colors look best throughout the day. You also want to make sure you like the way the paint complements your furniture and decor. 

If you’re still not quite sure what colors to go with, or you’d like a professional opinion, don’t hesitate to contact us at Paint Positive. As Northeast Ohio’s residential and commercial paint experts, we’re great at listening to your needs and applying our decades of painting experience and proven painting process to help you find the perfect solution to all your painting needs.