Wednesday, July 27, 2011

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?

Linking up to The Handmade Home 


The Handmade Home

9 comments:

  1. I'm hoping to re-do our living room area whenever we move, so this post was really helpful! Now I just need to decide what colors I really love so that I can pick a color scheme I'll be happy with!

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  2. Love this! We have blues and greens in our home (along with a lot of neutral tan) and I'm playing around with painting a bathroom a coastal blue. Thanks for sharing! :)

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  3. This is such great advice! I love the paint colors you picked out. I have been living in my house for awhile and still have rooms to be painted. I really have issues when picking out the right accessories...I always halt from making a decision b/c either I don't know it works or it is too expensive!

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  4. really like those colors and fabric choices! good taste! i have a new fave paint color that we just did in walker's room - it's called "Comfort Gray" from sherwin-williams. it's a silver/gray/light blue mix.

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  5. Visiting via the linky party on the handmade home - I am drawn to certain colors naturally and I work with those in mind to create a space around them. Always changing things around, though.

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  6. Visiting from handmade home and I adore your color choices and the fabric is fantastic!!!! I'm using similar colors in our new home and it's been a lot of fun reinventing this place and making it our own.

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  7. LOVE these fabric choices! AWESOME color! ;)

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  8. What a gorgeous color palette!! Hubby and I were pretty reckless when choosing paint colors for our first home and did all the painting before we moved in (mostly to beat the workers to have new floors installed). Some of them I'm regretting and planning to repaint at least our hall bath!

    Living in a white-walled apartment makes you color obsessed!!

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  9. I love the colors! I hope you will share pictures soon! Blue and red seem to be my new goto colors also... great combo!

    Tiffany {Living Savvy}

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