Choosing The Right Exterior Paint Color
Carroll Painting
A house is more than just a place to live and an investment for homeowners it is also a canvas for creative self expression. You are the homeowner and you can select the furniture, flooring, art, landscaping and every other element of your home’s interior and exterior design to suit your tastes, needs, and budget. One of the most consequential design decisions a homeowner will ever make is what color to paint their home. Exterior painting is a long term commitment that will have a big impact on your curb appeal. Today the experts here at Carrol Painting are sharing five tips for selecting an exterior paint color for your home and remember once you have picked your color call us for our exterior painting services!
Tips For Choosing The Right Exterior Paint Color
- Explore your surroundings for inspiration: Drive around your neighborhood and examine the colors of your neighbor’s homes. Do you live in an historic area where the homes share common architectural features or maybe a newer suburb with only a few colors on display? You can use your observations as a starting point. Do you want to match with the neighbors or do you want your home to stand out with a unique color? Observing surrounding homes can help you find out. You should also take in the surrounding natural environment. You can use the colors of local plants and soils to blend in with nature or you can use contrasting colors and stand out from the landscape. All of this starts with observing your environment.
- Examine your home: On the other hand you should not only observe your surroundings you also need to examine your house itself. The style of your home offers insights into what colors you may want to choose. You can embrace tradition and paint your home in the colors its architectural cousins are known for or you can purposely seek out a new path. You can ignore tradition and put an exuberant collection of pastels on a ranch-style home or bold hues on a Victorian. Whether you are seeing to follow or break with tradition you also need to keep in mind the existing colors of the home. What color are your window trims, foundation, roof, and interiors (especially if your exterior paint choice is clearly visible from inside the house). Do you want colors that will contrast with or match these elements? Whatever you choose you should make sure that these colors don’t clash because clashing colors can hurt curb appeal.
- Don’t chase trends and employ color wheel rules: You should not paint your house a specific color because that color is trendy right now. Trends come and go but your paint job will remain for many years so you should not pick a color based on contemporary design trends. Instead stick to tried and true guidelines like color wheel rules. Utilize complimentary colors that are opposites on the color wheel or alternatively embrace hues in the same family or hues that are neighbors on the color wheel. The color wheel can be a powerful tool for picking the right paint colors for your home.
- Test your selection: After you have narrowed down your paint color to one or two choices you should test them. Exterior paint colors often appear lighter when applied to an entire house than they may have originally so it’s important to see them out in the wild before you commit to them. Get samples and paint large swaths of your house’s exterior so you can see how it looks in real life. Look at the areas painted with the sample paint under various light conditions including sun and in shadow and observe them at various times of day so you can be sure you want to pick this specific color.
Whatever reason you found or repainting your home when the time comes call Carroll Painting for all of your interior and exterior house painting needs. We are the best house painters in the entire great state of Colorado!