Painting Our Interior - Part I: Choosing the Colors

From the moment my husband and I first visited the home that we bought a little over a year ago, we knew we’d need to change the colors of the walls inside our house. The hallway, living room and master bedroom were a mint green color that appears to have been original décor from the house’s early 1970s origin. The dining room and bathroom were a beige color that reminded me too much of the long line of rental apartments I’d lived in over the years. The kitchen may have been the worst. The walls were a shade of white (who knew white had so many shades?) and there was a floral wallpaper border around the top and at chair rail height. The second bedroom was the only room in the house with a nice color- a pretty, pale blue.

I actually picked up some paint chips before we had even closed on the house. But a year later, the walls were still untouched. Finally, we decided to start picking out some colors. We had seen an article in Consumer Reports that ranked Behr paints high in several categories, so we headed to Home Depot to look at paint chips. I’ve read numerous books, magazines and web site articles and watched countless television shows about decorating, almost all of them including some sort of color choice. In fact, there is a show on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) called Get Color that is completely devoted to color choices in the home.

Yet, even with all that collected information, I still felt completely incapable of choosing colors for my own home. So, I started with what I did know. I did know that we live in a region that has long winters. So, I wanted my house to feel warm inside, to make me feel cozy even when it was snowy and cold outside. At the same time, I didn’t want the rooms to be too dark or make the rooms feel closed in. As people who live through long winters know, there is all too little sunshine in the winter and I worried that dark rooms would only enhance the lazy depression that sometimes accompanies long hours of darkness.

I also had a few things within the house to contend with. All the woodwork- cabinets, trim, etc., are a honey-colored pine. I’m not the biggest fan of the pine, but I’m not about to change the kitchen cabinets or baseboards at this point. So, I wanted colors that would coordinate with the wood. Since there’s more wood in the kitchen than anywhere else, I started there. With the white walls, the knotty pine cabinets reminded me of a lakeside vacation home- the kind with limited plumbing. I thought an orange color would be a good compliment to the cabinets. It’s warm, bright and would make the cabinets fit in rather than stick out. Unfortunately, orange isn’t just orange, so I then needed to decide which color orange to pick. My husband preferred Mango, but we finally settled on Orange Burst.

Another difficulty our house presented was that from the kitchen door, one can see down the hall and into the living room. That would seem to explain why so much of the house was mint green. I wanted the hall to be a continuous color, but I didn’t want the kitchen and living room to be boring. I also didn’t want the windowless hall to be too dark. I chose to paint the hall, one wall of the kitchen and two walls in the living room the same pale yellow color. I chose a color of yellow two shades darker for the rest of the living room, to give some variety to the room.

The bedroom color was easy to choose. My husband’s favorite color is green. Pale green is a calming, soothing color- perfect for a bedroom.

The dining room was hard to figure out. I wanted the color to compliment the orange and yellow I’d chosen for the main parts of the house. Some months earlier I’d planted the idea of a red room in my husband’s head and he liked it, so we decided to go with red for the dining room. I don’t like pinky-reds, and we didn’t want anything too dark because the lighting in the dining room isn’t great in the evening. We decided on Fiery Red, which was a more orange-based red.