Would you like to create a stunning interior? It is absolutely attainable with patience, perseverence, and paint! Decorators and designers have the advantage of drawing from palettes they have studied but how does someone with less experience in interior design achieve a "wow" effect? Mood is one criterion for choosing paint color and many paint stores arrange their display presorted to assist with identifying warm and cool colors. Decorating books and magazines, too, are abundant and inspiring and the many photographs within could help you shape your goals for your new look.

Glance around your home and identify a couple of your favorite things, maybe some photographs or antiques on display. Would a taupe wall or a maroon accent make your favorite things "pop?" If nothing strikes your eye, try a different approach, such as integrating the views from your windows as art in the room. This might seem obvious if the scenes from your windows are inherently dramatic--such as cityscapes, waterfronts or mountains--but even a scene as simple as a garden path or a grove of trees can be dramatically enhanced if a contrasting or complimentary paint color on the walls guides your eye to the window. Of course, conversely, the option exists to tease the origins of your colors from your interior surroundings. Whether you are planning to keep most of your furnishings or will be replacing them, extracting your wall color from a thread in your uphostery or your carpet can enliven your entire room.

Multicolor or monochromatic?

The advantage of painting each room a different color is that it provides variety, both visually and in mood. Keep in mind that, whether you will be painting just one room or your entire interior, an important consideration when working with multiple colors is the transition of color from room to room. During your color selection process, after you have gathered swatches of paint colors and identified those which you most prefer, purchase a quart (a smaller quantity is fine if available) of each of your top color choices for sample purposes, then brush the paints onto your key wall surfaces. If you are experimenting with more than one color, be sure to test the paint colors in an area where you can see how they relate to one another.

A monochromatic scheme

A monochromatic paint scheme eliminates the challenge of evaluating the colors in the context of one another and can produce a very elegant effect. White immediately comes to mind but I have seen stunning results in green and a buttery yellow. A monochromatic color scheme lends cohesiveness to a home, making a grand home feel more intimate and a small house seem larger by creating a visual unfolding as you walk from room to room. The solitariness of mood imposed by one color can easily be remedied by varying accent colors from room to room.

Local Licensed Painting Contractor

Vedder Painting is a licensed painting contractor working in Aptos, Capitola, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, San Lorenzo Valley, Felton, Ben Lomond, Boulder Creek, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Los Gatos Hills.

Call today for a free consultation and bid: 831.338.8080

Ceiling, floor and cabinets affect paint color

Be sure to include your ceiling as a color that needs to compliment or effectively contrast your wall color. You'd be amazed at how important this is, particularly if you are planning to paint the walls white or another neutral color. All neutral colors have hues--black, gray, yellow, pink, blue--that may or may not be evident at first glance but will become readily apparent as soon as they are applied next to an adjacent color. Flooring, too, should be treated as a color. Whether you are plannig to replace it or to keep your exisiting flooring, it should factor into your choice of paint colors. Carpets have obvious color but even wood floors have hues of yellow, orange, red or purple that will clash with certain paint colors, including neutrals. And just as with ceilings and floors, cabinet color should be taken into account, whether new or existing, painted or stained.

Light changes the appearance of paint color. Have you ever gone to a paint store, come home with a fistful of swatches, and found that the color you were confident would be perfect appears completely different in your home than it did in the store or outside? Light, shadow and wall texture can significantly affect the appearance of interior paint color. A room with small windows and no skylights will be minimally affected by natural light in terms of paint color appearance, with occassional variations here and there at times. A room with windows and skylights which admit natural light from several different angles simultaneously can pose a special challenge for paint color selecton. When light enters a room at inconsistent angles, the appearance of the paint color is far more likely to demonstrate variance. In rooms such as this, when you are ready to apply sample paints, apply the samples to more than one wall so that the effect of light can be studied under real life conditions. The variation could be as pronounced as making the exact same green paint appear brownish olive on wall and grayish sage on another. Or the variation might be more subtle, such as making a neutral cream in the morning light appear very pale peach by afternoon. Another factor to consider in the paint color selection process is that brands of paint vary in the amount of pigment they contain. Therefore, two paint companies might produce swatches that appear similar but translate very uniquely on the wall. This is because one company uses more or less, or lighter or darker, pigment. If you find a swatch you like but the paint sample when applied doesn't create the effect you anticipated, try a sample from a similar swatch in a different brand of paint--it just might work!