If you are building or renovating your dream home you are in the process of selecting all materials and colours for your new space. How exciting…!!!
However, this process can be quite overwhelming especially if you don’t know where to start and what to do first. So here are my tips on when is the right time to pick your interior wall colour…
If you are building your colour scheme from scratch
Starting from scratch gives you so many different options. So where exactly do you start?
When we think of wall colour, it is actually one of the products we apply quite early in the process of building which is once the house is ready for the fit-out. But here it comes, it is actually one of the last colours you actually should select. You are asking me now, why is that? Am I right?
The secret is that you have a huge range of wall colours available plus you can even get a custom-made mix if you need to match the colour to an existing material. You want a starting point and narrow down your choices. I work with Dulux and they have over 4.500 colours to choose from. Just to give you a number. That is quite a lot, isn’t it?
You don’t have such a great flexibility or choice when selecting your flooring type (carpets, tiles), colours for cabinetry, colours for upholstery etc. So the best thing to do is to select these items first:
- Flooring (carpets, tiles, laminate, timber floorboards)
- Kitchen Cabinetry
- Kitchen benchtops
- Splashback Tiles
- Fabric for Sofa and/ or armchairs (especially accent fabrics)
- Artwork
- Rug
- also determine your interior style – Scandi, Hamptons, Mid-Century, Contemporary etc.
Once you’ve got some of these items sorted, you can start looking at wall colours to match. The order is to start with that item where you have the least choices of colour. This determines how you go about other items where you have greater colour choices. Always get a sample from your selections and compare them to each other if they fit together.
You can see, it is a bit of a process and not always straightforward. Creating a colour scheme from scratch for a newly built home requires some pre-planning and preparing so you won’t end up getting yourself into that position where you have to make rushed decisions. This is something you really would like to avoid.
If you are renovating room by room
You might have already updated your kitchen or your bathroom? Then there is a different approach on how to select your wall colour. You keep on developing your colour scheme. Let’s say you recently got a new kitchen and now your wall colour doesn’t fit with it anymore or you would like to complement the new style. So here is how to go about it…
For instance: You have a new kitchen in white. All you want is to not paint your walls in white as well. How boring and monotone would that be. You want to introduce another neutral colour, a lightly coloured grey or a grey-beige for example. But how to find the right colour now amongst all these different greys and grey-beiges?
You look for all available colours your kitchen has to offer, such as kitchen cabinets, benchtop, splashback. What can you see? Even if it’s just a tiny speckle you can see in your benchtop material, but it is still part of your scheme. Select something which is in harmony with either the marble veins, speckles in your benchtop etc.
Bonus: (I will develop a post on how to develop a colour scheme from an artwork or piece of fabric to explain the process.)
Before your get started on painting your entire home
Once you have a selection going you consider for your walls, then it’s time to purchase some small sample pots. You don’t want to paint the whole house right away. Paint some patches in areas in your home which get a lot of light, areas which get the least amount of light and an area which is somewhere in between. Once you’ve painted these little patches, have a look what the colour looks like during daylight, at night under artificial lighting. Even during seasons when the sun comes into your home in different angles makes your home either brighter or darker and the paint will look differently. Make sure you are happy with what you have selected. It is easier to reassess and keep looking if you are not happy than having already painted your whole house and realize afterwards that it’s not the colour you were after. Repainting cost you quite a bit of money and time.
I hope these tips on when is the right time to pick your interior wall colour are helpful to you. If you have any questions to this process, you are more than welcome to leave a comment below. I commit to answer ASAP.
Don’t be shy to share the posts with someone you know who would benefit from these tips… Thank you 🙂
