Tips for Picking Wall Paint Colors

As I’ve mentioned here, we are in the process of building our first house! This is a truly exciting project for me. I love decorating and I’m thrilled to get to pick every little detail and design the house to be exactly the way I want it but it can also a bit overwhelming. There are so many options and so many decisions and it’s hard to picture all of it coming together without seeing it. I am so afraid that I may love this tile and these cabinets and this granite and once it’s put all together it is going to look like a crazy mismatched mess and I’m going to hate my decisions.

One of the hardest decisions for me was picking paint colors. There are SO MANY different shades of similar colors and what if I pick a tan that looks pink-ish once its up on the wall. Most people can buy a sample of paint and test a small section on their wall but we don’t have that option, we have to pick out our paint now for a house that won’t be ready for another 5-ish months. I’m happy to say I’ve chosen the colors and I’m praying they look as awesome on the walls as they do in my imagination.

This Glidden commercial made me laugh because it can be very overwhelming!  Although I’m not sure I agree with their solution to have less options.

 

Here are some things that helped me narrow down the paint colors:

1. Before going to the paint store, search around on pinterest and houzz and find some rooms that you really love that you may want your house to look like.

Ex. I really loved how light and peaceful these master bedrooms were with a light blue/aqua/teal color.

1. Once you have an idea of what color you have in mind, search online (once again I used Pinterest and Houzz) for specific paint colors and find pictures of rooms painted those colors and make a preliminary list of color swatches you want to check out. (Keep in mind that lighting can change the way a color looks so don’t base your decision off one photograph, look for several using the same paint colors)

Ex. Our builder uses Sherwin Williams paint so I searched “Sherwin Williams” to get specific SW colors and stumbled upon several options I liked including “Sea Salt” and “Rainwashed”.

1. Then go to the paint store and grab all the swatches they have in that color range including the preliminary paint list and more. In doing this, I found a couple others that I really liked as well including “Dewy”, “Glimmer” and “Fleeting Green”

2. I then sat down several different times with the large bundle of swatches looking over them and adding stars to the ones I kept leaning towards. But finally I had to make a decision so I took my samples out on the back porch so I was in the natural light and starting going through them all. I was able to eliminate several this way because once I saw them in the natural light some had more of a green tint than I wanted and some looked more blue than I wanted, etc.

1. Then I brought the samples that I had left and taped them up on the wall in a room that had natural light coming in. It helps to step back sometimes and see the color from a distance. I started out by taping up the entire strip of paint samples and grouping them by room. It’s normal when you have several colors together to lean towards some and notice different hues in others when comparing. I also made sure to look at them with the blinds open and closed to make sure the lighting didn’t change my opinion.

1. Then I start cutting off the extra samples that I wasn’t considering narrowing it down to only the paint samples still in the running. I was on the phone with a friend and stayed in that room looking at the paint and moving them around a little to see if I could narrow them down when they were next to a different sample.

*Excuse these terrible pictures, they are fuzzy and the lighting in them didn’t work out well but I just wanted to give you an idea of what helped me narrow down the colors.

 

Typically there were certain ones I kept favoring and I finally chose the three colors for our new house.

We get 3 paint choices so we’re doing the master bedroom with one, the dining room with one and the rest of the house with a good neutral greige color. My top choices were the Sherwin Williams colors: Sea Salt, Windsor Greige and Sandy Ridge.

 

1. After narrowing it down to the final swatches, I then went back one more time and looked up these three specific colors on houzz and pinterest to see them used in rooms to confirm my choices. Thank goodness we have internet and access to seeing these paint colors used on walls! That was a huge help for me throughout this entire process! In doing this last step, I actually ended up changing the “Sea Salt” color to “Rainwashed”. It was a little brighter than Sea Salt and it was a swatch I didn’t have on hand to consider.

 

The good news is paint is cheap and easy to change but I wanted to make the best decision possible to eliminate painting right away in our new house. I hope you find these tips helpful if you’re trying to narrow down the paint colors.