Home Interior Wall Color Tips

Avoiding White

• Brighten your home and put a personal touch on each room by choosing colors you like. Avoid using plain white for your walls. If you simply can't decide on a color, look to neutral paint colors like beige, gray or blue-gray. These colors are likely to match most furnishings. White paint lacks personality and can give the impression that you haven't really given a lot of thought to the interior design of your home.

Room Size

• Take into account the size of the room when choosing color for the walls. Dark or intensely bold colors can make small rooms seem smaller, while colors that are very light can make big rooms or rooms with disproportionately tall ceilings seem overwhelmingly large. Cool colors like blue, green and purple are recessive colors, meaning they tend to push the walls into the background. This makes these colors appropriate for small rooms. Warmer colors like orange and red bring a wall closer to the foreground, visually. This creates a more intimate setting and makes these colors appropriate for larger rooms.

Accent Wall

• It is becoming increasingly common to paint a room in multiple colors by selecting one wall to serve as an accent wall. An accent wall is a wall that has been painted a different color from the others. Sometimes an accent wall is a drastically different color from the other walls; other times it is similar. Accent walls that are very different from the other colors in the room will add drama to the room, while accent colors that are similar to the other walls will simply give the room a level of complexity it would otherwise lack. Try to match your accent wall to the pre-existing color scheme in the room -- that is, the color of the furniture and accessories.

Color Selection

• Choose a handful of swatches that appeal to you from the store where you plan to buy the paint. Take the swatches home and hold them up to the walls and furniture of the room where you plan to paint. Narrow your selection of possible paint colors as you take into account the room size, your favorite hues and what color will match your furniture. Once you've managed to narrow down your choices to two or three options, buy small samples of these colors. Paint large squares of each sample on your wall to help you make a choice. This will also help you be sure that the colors dry as they appear on the swatches.