How to choose the right paint colour for any room in the house

Paint colour is one of the simplest and least expensive ways to transform the look of a room and add value to your home. You can completely alter the look of a room with a fresh coat of paint. Many tools exist to help you choose a great colour to achieve the look and feel you’re after.

Choosing a wall paint that complements your furniture and achieves the vibe you want the room to emanate can be easily accomplished by following a few simple steps. But before you plunge right into paint colour selection, you’d be wise to finalize the overall scheme of the room in question. It’s easy to change paint colour but not so easy to change the fabric on your couch or armchair, or the colour and style of the flooring or carpet.

Experts advise to first spend time thinking about the mood you’d like to set in the room you are decorating. Bedrooms are typically a place of quiet and peace, so you may want to consider a calming colour. Children’s bedrooms are often a place where bright colour is welcome, and you have a little more freedom to go bold. Think about what you want the room to be, and this will help guide your selections.

Once the room scheme has been determined, select your furniture first and match the paint to the pieces you have. Your fabric colour selections will be significantly more limited than your paint colour options, so all the more reason to prioritize the choice of furniture before paint.

After you’ve picked out a fabric for your furniture, secure a swatch that you can take with you to the paint store. Using the fabric as a guide, look for paint chips that bring out the various tones in your fabric. If you are stuck for ideas, you can use the colour wheel as a guide to the colours that will work well with your fabric.

Another increasingly common process for assessing paint colour is to visit a paint manufacturer’s website. Many now have tools with which you can select a colour and see it applied to a virtual room.

Once you have found three colours you like, whether in the store or online, purchase samples of each to try out on an area of your wall. By trying out three colours at a time, you will save on trips to the paint store. Samples typically cost about $3 to $5 and will provide more than enough paint to cover a wall area large enough to get a sense for whether or not you like the colour.

Once you have painted a portion of your wall with the sample paint, wait for it to dry before you decide on how it looks. Paint colour looks different when it is wet than when it is dry. After it is dry, be sure to examine it in the day and at night with the room lights on for a complete sense of what the colour will be.

Hold various room elements near the new colour — such as a swatch of your drapes and sofa fabric, or pillows that you have as accents — to see how they work together. Light hugely affects colour and how it is perceived. Incandescent lighting tends to warm up reds and yellows, whereas halogen lighting is cooling and tends to enhance blues and greens.

A new coat of just the right paint colour pulls a room together to enhance both the value of the home and your pleasure.

— realtor.com