color picking....

One of the first things we did when we moved into our new house was paint. The walls and the ceilings were all the same color.  If you have a contractor grade house and didn't spring for the 3 tone paint upgrade - chances are, yours are too. 

I am pretty passionate about paint. Several of my interior design classes were about paint, color, theory, etc. and those were my FAVORITE classes! There is so much that goes into picking a paint color. More on color and paint and light and the whole wonderful mess in later posts though.

Here is where I admit one of the mistakes I made when I picked out our paint. When we moved in the paint on the walls was orange - or some not so lovely shade of said color. I knew I wanted a warm gray color and when I slapped them on the wall both seemed fine and pretty gray. Well, wouldn't you know it, color+light are a funny thing and once the whole house was painted it seemed less gray than it had before.

The mistake I made was NOT having a white base to compare it to.  I was comparing the paint against the existing orange paint.  Naturally, any paint with even a hint of gray is going to look fine (or at least better because it's hard not to look better than orange). 

Just a few TIPS for choosing a BASE PAINT:
1. Make sure you have a neutral playing field. Unless you're slapping paint up on freshly primed walls, you are going to have some interference with an existing color. To remedy this, paint a large area of the wall with white paint and THEN put your various paint colors on that.

2. Make sure you place your paint sample at different heights on the wall.  The paint I chose is VERY gray near the floor but gets more beige near the ceiling.  There are many different reasons for this (which we will discuss later) but be sure you like the paint up high and down low. 

3. Paint each paint sample on walls with a different exposure. For example, a paint color will look different on a Northern exposed wall than it will on a Southern exposed wall. The quality and scope of the light changes during the day and will look different depending on the wall(s) it's on.  I'm not suggesting that you paint different exposures with different paints (please don't), I'm just suggesting that you find a paint you like equally in different exposures. 

There is SO MUCH to be said on color and paint. I could go on for days #paintfordays but we'll start there.