Painting your home can be a lot of hard work, it can also be fun. The time you spend choosing colours for each room can be a bonding experience for the family. Once the job is completed, you will feel like you have a new home.
Choosing what colour to paint each room is the first hurdle that you will have to get over. This is something that you may think is easy, until you look at just how many shades of beige there are. When you entered the home improvement store you probably didn’t imagine yourself creating a shortlist of Camel Hair, Gobi Dunes, and Cotton Duck. Yes, those are all real paint colours!
Choosing one paint colour for each room is challenging enough, although it really boils down to a matter of personal preference. If, however, you want to use two colours in one space then this is where you need to be very careful. Colour combinations can work wonderfully together, or create nightmarish clashing of hues.
To help you out with your colour selection, we’ve put together a handy guide below so that you don’t make a mistake that your whole family is forced to live with. It is always advised that you test out any paint colour and combination before you paint a whole room. Not only should you test them, but you should wait a full 24 hours and make sure you have seen the colours at different times of the day. In daylight, it may look quite different than it does under artificial light.
Here are the four worst color combinations that you should NEVER use:
1. Steer clear of warm colours and cool colours.
Warm colours such as red, orange and yellow work well together. It is easy to see how they compliment each other. The same is true for blues and greens. These two colour palettes should never be mixed together. The difference in mood is to stark for a room to look good if you were to have green and red together in the same room.
If you can keep your colour choices siloed in either warm OR cool colours then you will be on the right track. Warm colours create a friendly and comfortable atmosphere in a room. Cooler colours tend to calm people down and make them feel relaxed. Blues and greens are good choices for smaller rooms as they tend to make a room feel much more spacious.
2. Dark colours
It’s not all about the colour when it comes to bad paint combinations for your home. You also need to consider the brightness of the room too. If you have two dark colours on the walls with nothing to brighten them up, the room will look sinister and uninviting. When deciding on your paint combinations you should also take into account the furniture and fixtures in the room. For example, you don’t want to have a kitchen with dark cabinets and dark walls. It is always best to contrast dark with light.
If you choose to have bright colours then great. Two light colours can work very well together. The key thing here is to make sure that they aren’t too bright. The wall colour should be the backdrop of a room and not the main feature.
3. Colours that have connotations
When you see a vibrant red and a deep green together, you will probably start to feel a little festive. These are, after all, the colours of Christmas. This can look great on a Christmas tree decoration or a card. Putting these colours on your walls together will be a little distracting for guests. If all they can think about is Christmas in July then you need to take a hard look at your wall colour palette.
Another example of this would be the local sports team’s colours. Painting a man cave in blue and white might be the dream for many a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs fan. The last thing that you want is to have all of your guests start to think about the Stanley Cup every time they walk into your kitchen.
4. Neon, and well… anything
Neon colours are a very bold choice and should be handled with the same care that you would give to a radioactive substance of the same colour. They are very stimulating and eye-catching. If you really like neon colours, then it is always advised that you limit their use to accents and keep all other colours you pair it with muted. It is much better to keep neon colours off your walls.
A great way to use these colours is to have them as accessories in your room. These can be pillows, lamps, tables, or anything else that you can think of. The goal here is to highlight the features of your room instead of drowning out everything.
