The Handy Homeowner Girl

Red and dirty white. Not my favorite color combination!

When painting a room, the first thing I do is choose a color. This may seem like a relatively unimportnat part of the process, but it will impact what primer you buy and how many coats of paint you’ll have to do.  But although it’s an important choice and painting is a little time consuming, the great thing about it is that if you really hate the color, it’s fairly easy to change it. 

By the time I headed to Lowe’s to look at paint samples, I had been putting together a decorating book for a while. Basically, that comprised of looking through every Pottery Barn catalogue that came in the mail and seeing what rooms most inspired me, then tearing out the pages and saving them in categories (bedroom, guest room, kitchen, bathroom, etc.).  That helped me to figure out what I liked and didn’t like, and as a result, what would make me happy in each room.  But you can be inspired in other ways too – I had picked up a shower curtain at K-Mart, mostly black, but with blue flowers stitched into a border towards the top.  When choosing a color for the bathroom, then, I matched it to those little blue flowers – since they’re small, it’s not too matchy-matchy, but it unites the bathroom.  Searching through catalogues can also give you new ideas of what works and doesn’t work – I wouldn’t have thought to put brown and light blue together, but seeing it in magazines and catalogues appealed to me and I used that combination in my living room.  I also thought that eggplant with dark furniture in a bedroom would be too dark, but in a paint sample booklet, I saw that it worked well.

Here's a sample page from my inspiration book

Once I had a good idea in my head as to what colors I was looking for, I went to Lowe’s and picked out any and every sample that I was drawn to, and even a few that I wouldn’t have originally been interested in.  I didn’t buy any paint on that first visit, but instead brought all the samples home and spent the next few days wandering around my house figuring out what worked where.  I was definitely feeling impatient at the time, because the current paint was gross, I felt like things might be living in the carpet, and the whole house smelled of smoke from the previous owners, so I was ready to get painting and make it my own.  But I’m glad I took the time to pick out colors I was really satisfied with, because a year later, I’m still happy with the colors in each of the rooms. 

I picked up a LOT of samples

My paint choices:

Downstairs: For the living room/hallway/entryway, I chose a very light beachy blue: Lowe’s Valspar Cake Stand Blue

To get the airy beach feeling, I went with this very light blue

Kitchen: For the kitchen, I chose a sandy brown (ocean and sand, I do live at the beach!) because my cabinets couldn’t handle the blue and I’m not redoing the kitchen yet: Lowe’s Valspar Milk Toast

The kitchen needed a sandier color to warm up the old cabinets

Downstairs Bathroom: For the downstairs bathroom, I chose a shade warmer than the Milk Toast, picked up from the stripes in my towels: Lowe’s Valspar La Fonda Boulder

Used a shade of tan pulled from the towels for this bathroom

Upstairs Hallway: I continued the Milk Toast throughout the upstairs hallways to unite the two floors a little (it was the color of the wall next to the stairs)
Upstairs Bathroom: As I mentioned earlier, I chose this color to match the small flowers in my shower curtain: Lowe’s Valspar Blue Twilight

I love the blue in this bathroom so much that it's my favorite room in the house!

Office: For my office, I wanted a warm terracotta, which would highlight the orange in my world map and travel posters: Lowe’s Valspar Pompei Orange

The terracotta of the walls picks up the orange in the artwork nicely!

Guest room: Because the guest room is the smallest room, I wanted it to feel light, airy, and soothing for visitors, so I chose a very light green: Lowe’s Valspar Tempered Spring

The green is so light, it's hard to see it in photos

Master Bedroom: After seeing the combination of dark furniture with an eggplant wall color, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I painted my bedroom an eggplant color that makes it one of my favorite rooms in the house: Lowe’s Valspar Eddie Bauer Home Garnet

The light always brightens this in photos, but it's a much darker plum color

Let’s Paint! Part II will cover what supplies you’ll need.