Choosing the Wrong Paint Color for your Home is a Costly Mistake

[missmanors]

White is America's favorite house paint color, followed by beige, then gray, blue, green and yellow. Finding the right color for your home can be a daunting experience, but if you take your time to do some homework, it can be a lot less stressful. You don't want to make this decision lightly, as it's an expensive project, which you won't want to have to re-do any time soon.

Indoor painting mistakes can be changed with another coat of paint and cost just a few dollars, but when the mistake is the wrong color on the body of your home, it's not such an easy or cheap fix.

Look carefully at the roof shingles, any brick work, or whatever is around the outside of the home to pick out some colors or hues which should give you some ideas of colors that would be good choices. Also look around the neighborhood, you probably won't want a color that won't blend in with the neighbors' homes.

When you've thought it over and chosen a few possibilities for your new color, go to the paint store and buy a quart of each color that you think you may like. Then paint a large square of each color on a piece of plywood and prop the plywood up against the house, leaving the plywood pieces there for as long as it takes for you to make your final choice.

Never look at a paint chip and make your decision based on that little chip in the store. Looks really can be deceiving when it comes to these paint chips. Imagine the look on the lady that handed her painter the paint chip she had decided on, and then went off on a brief trip, coming home and finding that what she thought was a soft gray turned out to be lavender!!

One design manager, says that the architecture of your home should be the starting point for deciding on a color. Check pictures of similar homes in magazines and around your area for some ideas.

[flippinout]

One thing you have to be very careful of when choosing a paint color in the store from the paint chips that they show is to consider the lighting in the store. This lighting can cause a color to look vastly different in the store than it would look in natural lighting.

Choose the paint chips you think that you might like and then take them outside to look at in natural lighting. The difference in some of the colors in natural lighting can be quite significant.

I ran across this problem when picking out a throw rug to put in my newly redecorated living room. Once I paid for the rug, and got it outside in the natural lighting, I found I had to take it right back inside and exchange it for a different shade of the same color. The color difference inside the store as opposed to the color in natural lighting was astounding.

And, I do agree with the painting of large squares of plywood to prop up against your house as it would make it a lot easier to be sure that this would be the color you would really want on your home.

[flip_it_fast]

I could not even tell you how many times I went to the store purchased the "perfect" paint color for a room, painted the room and absolutely hated how it looked when I was done. Then, back to the store I would go and begin the process all over again. I have wasted so much money on paint it hurts!