Color Choices

Blues and greens have always been my favorite colors, so when we moved into our new home and I began looking through paint swatches at Lowe's and Home Depot, I came home with oodles of swatches in varying shades of these two colors.  I suppose they remind me of the ocean, which is my favorite place to go, so it's no wonder that I would want to surround myself with something that looks like the ocean.

The downstairs of our home has a pretty open floor plan, but there are definitely divides between the main living areas.  The eat-in kitchen opens up to the family room, and the dining room is adjacent to the kitchen via an open doorway.  I wanted these three rooms to flow nicely together, so I found a swatch of Valspar paint at Lowe's, of which I loved all 3 colors!  This made it quite easy to keep a good flow of blue in the downstairs and yet still have some variety.  Here are the three colors:

Family Room - Distant Valley

Dining Room - Sparkling Lake

Kitchen - Tropical Bay

Each color actually looks quite different once on the walls, as is usually the case, but we love how it turned out.  For the kitchen I chose a Better Homes & Gardens fabric that has a natural linen background with a blue and green floral design.  

The blue matches my paint color perfectly (which is how I chose the paint) and the greens allow me to keep the green placemats I already had, while pulling in some other green elements in the room.  

The family room color is soft enough that it makes our room feel cheerful during the day and cozy at night, and I love it!  Our sofa was a wedding gift and it's a bit darker than I would prefer, but when I added some blue throw pillows, it sort of lightened up.  Amazing what a few accessories can do!  The right shade of red can go so nicely with the right shade of blue, so as a POP in this room, we have a wing chair that I reupholstered with a red chenille fabric.  You can read about how I tied in my blue and red with a throw pillow here.  

I had been wanting a piece of art for several years, and when my parents came for their first visit, they brought us a great house warming gift:  the art I'd wanted!  We held it up over the fireplace and it matched the paint color almost perfectly!

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The dining room has been my focus the past few weeks, simply working on some chairs so that it's functional once again.  Fabric choices have been difficult for this room.  Originally I was using a pamphlet from Lowe's as my color inspiration here:

I love the combination of these colors and the red would tie in so beautifully with the red chair in the family room.  But I wasn't sure about it.  We held up some red drapes in the room and the feeling was a bit more modern and formal than what I was looking for.  I wanted something geometric in here, so I've decided to use a Waverly fabric for the window treatments.

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Eventually, I plan to bring in red with some smaller accessories.  That will have to wait, though, as we're working on a small budget so all of this takes much time!  In fact, none of these three rooms is quite done, but I'm looking forward to completing some projects in the next few weeks and revealing some pictures of our home!

In summary, here's how I recommend choosing colors for your home:

1.Use the colors that you really like.  Yes, there are color trends, but if we all tried to keep up with those, we'd constantly be changing our homes and on a small budget, that's just not possible.  Choose colors that you really love, use them tastefully, and you'll most likely be happy with your choices for a long time. 

2. Find fabric or another piece of inspiration first.  The fabric in the kitchen determined my colors for all three of these rooms, so I guess I didn't follow this exactly, but it has worked out so far.  Matching fabrics or art to paint can be a challenge, so if you start with some inspiration, chances are you will end up with the perfect color palette. 

3. Keep a flow of color throughout your home.  Choose one or two colors and use these as your primary paint colors, choosing different shades and accenting with pops of colorful accessories.  Accessories are easy to change out as trends come and go, so you won't have to break the bank, or take lots of time to repaint a room by adding orange throw pillows, a pink vase,  a purple throw or a lime green end table.  

How do you choose colors for your home?

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