How to Choose the Perfect Living Room Paint Color: 7 Simple Tips
Are you struggling to know where to begin with choosing paint colors for your home? Today, I’m sharing my top tips for choosing the perfect living room paint color!
I’m about to dive into the huge project of painting the main areas of our home. It’s been a long time since I had to choose a living room paint color, and I forgot how intimidating it can be! The color palette you choose for your living room is often a color that extends into things like your entry, hallways, and more. It can feel like a lot of pressure to choose the right color!
I put a lot of thought into choosing our living room paint color and I’m really excited to dive in. Let me walk you through the process of choosing the perfect paint color for your home, too!
Seven Tips for Choosing the Right Living Room Paint Color
Don’t Start With the Paint!
It’s a really common misconception that you should paint a room before you do anything else. But, in reality, choosing a paint color for your space should be one of the last steps in planning a design for your room! There are a zillion different paint colors out there, but most other elements and focal points of your space (rugs, sofas, decor, etc) will have more limited choices. So, start with those big anchor pieces and then pick a paint color that works with them. Not the other way around!
Ask Yourself What Vibe You Want
Are you aiming for a really calm and relaxing space? Or, do you want something with a brighter and bold mood? Do you want the paint color to feel like a luxurious touch to your formal living room? Or, are you looking for something that feels really casual and calming for family movie nights?
The paint color you choose of your living room has a drastic effect on how the whole room feels. So, don’t rush the decision! Think about how you want the room to feel and go from there.
Choose a Color Family
Once you’ve got a basic design down and you’ve chosen some of the biggest pieces for your room, it’s time to think about what color family you want to use for your space. Neutrals like white or tan are probably the most popular living room paint colors. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun! Branching out into more rich hues or saturated colors can be really exciting. There’s no reason you can’t paint your living room blue or green or anything else your heart desires.
But, you can’t pick a paint color until you narrow down the general color you want! So, spend some time browsing for inspiration and start there before you try to pick an actual paint.
When we were choosing paint for our living room area, I knew I wanted to stick with warm white paint colors. I don’t think all of the walls in this space will stay white forever – we may add wallpaper to the dining room or accents other places in the space. But, a white living room is a really versatile backdrop to let me add in other color and fun elements down the road, so I wanted to start there.
Narrow Down Your Options
With your general color picked out, it’s time to narrow all of the options down to just a few. This can feel really overwhelming, so I’ll share a few of my tricks for how to do this.
First of all, you can start by searching on Google or Pinterest for the most popular paint colors in your color family. I’ve even got some posts in the archive that might help!
- The best blue gray paint colors
- Paint colors I’ll use again and again
- Where to use dark green paint colors
- The best dark paint colors (and how to use them)
Another tip is to choose a specific paint line and only look at paint colors within that brand. If you open yourself up to all the paint in the world, it can be really overwhelming! But, if you tell yourself you’re only going to choose from Benjamin Moore or Sherwin-Williams or whatever it’s a little easier.
For the most part, I personally stick to Behr or Clare. I love Behr when I want something specific or need to try out a lot of options. It’s great when I want to be able to just run to the store and come home with paint. But Clare is a really great brand for me when I’m feeling overwhelmed by options. They have a really limited selection of gorgeous paint colors, and I know I will like all of them. So, if things feel like too much I like to stick with Clare because it narrows my options down and makes it way easier to choose!
If you are shopping at the paint store and plan to actually paint swatches on your wall, I still recommend starting by bringing home some of the paper color swatches first! Grab a ton and lay them out in your space to help narrow it down a little. The more you can get actual colors into your space and see them there, the easier it will be to figure out what you want.
Sample the Colors On Multiple Walls
Once you’ve narrowed all of your option to 3 or 4, it’s time to do some sampling! You can use a peel and stick sample if the brand offers it, or you can paint the samples directly on the wall. I like to use these paintable swatches when I’m sampling, so it’s easy to move them around and I don’t have to paint multiple walls.
And that brings me to my next tip – do NOT just test your paint on one wall! The light will hit each wall in your room differently, and it might look completely different on one wall than it does on another. Move that paint swatch all over the room and hold it up next to everything to make sure you like it from every angle!
Leave Your Samples Up For a Few Days
In addition to texting your samples on multiple walls, you should leave them up for several days so you can see them in all different lights. The perfect greige in the morning light might turn way more gray than you want once the sun goes down! Room colors are meant to shift and change over the course of the day, so make sure you’re happy with all of the versions of the shade you choose.
Consider Other Elements in the Room
Be sure to consider how your chosen paint color will look next to all of the elements in the room that aren’t changing. Do you like it with the ceiling color? How does it work next to the trim and baseboards? Is there a fireplace with brick or stone that can affect the color?
When we were deciding on a paint color for our living room, we actually chose one paint color over another because one of them made our trim look yellow. I don’t plan on re-painting the trim, so that would have been a bummer to miss! So, any accent in the room that isn’t changing should absolutely be taken into account.