Have you been planning to do remodeling or painting in your Pleasant Hill home? Or do you have the pleasure of having just bought a new home and getting to decide on the color scheme?
Getting to plan a new house’s interior (or starting over with the decorating in an old house) can be fun and exciting. It can also be a big anxiety producer. You would think that having a blank palette and choosing anything you want should just be enjoyable and easy. Yet that “simple” decision can be one of the most worry producing parts of the whole adventure. Picking a color scheme can be more difficult than you think.
Counter intuitively, the color chip aisle of the paint store is not the best place to start. If you already know your color scheme, that is great. If you’re not quite sure, and most people aren’t, then it’s best to spend some time considering your needs and personality first. Keep in mind that you might not really want to live in a showroom. Your colors should make you feel welcome and relaxed as well as being beautiful. Ideally, everyone in the family should at least have a small say in the decision.
The first thing to do is to spend some time just flipping through magazines or furniture catalogs. When you see a room that appeals to you, hold the page several feet away from you and decide what the over-arching color is. You will also want to note if a specific accent color draws your attention. Another good way to get a feel for room colors is to stroll through furniture showrooms and department stores. They often they have small areas made to look like rooms, and they go to a lot of trouble to make these little areas appealing. Of course, you can also fall back on all the years you’ve noticed your friends’ and relatives’ houses and which ones made you feel more comfortable. One last place to get ideas, especially to see whole homes that might have been decorated with one theme, is to tour the model homes in new subdivisions and see what is new and popular in painting in the Pleasant Hills area.
The next step is to acknowledge the things you cannot change. Are you stuck with a stone floor with a green cast to it, or an antique sofa covered in red velvet that must be displayed, or custom made cabinets of a certain color? You can use color coordination to minimize the effect of these things, but it is better to work with them than against them. You also have to take into account any colors of your current furniture, drapes, or other fabrics that you are going to keep.
Finally you’ve decided on the general range of colors that you want in each room. Still, it’s not time to head to the paint store yet! Paint is the easiest thing in this whole undertaking to get right. Paint can be computer matched to almost any color of the rainbow. Pick out your fabrics and things like counter tops and sinks that, while they come in a great assortment of colors, do not come in every color.
Now that you have your fabrics, and perhaps a sample chip from other surfaces, you can enjoy looking at all the colors of paint available. You can see how the key to stress free painting in Pleasant Hill, or anywhere in the Bay Area, is plenty of pre-planning.
