The average home here in South Charlotte is about 3,500 square feet. These homes have about 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, the usual kitchen, living room, dining room, office or flex room and a bonus or playroom. If you break these rooms down into “spaces that need color” you’re looking at about 14 or so colors. That’s a lot of rooms/spaces to consider for color and it’s very typical that most of my clients wind up with at least 10 colors for their home.

Now this sounds like a lot of paint to purchase but keep in mind, color is what will define the space in your home. Color gives a home interest instead of using just one color throughout and just makes it pretty darn beautiful.

There are people who totally avoid the decision of choosing colors and just choose one or two boring beiges for their home and are happy with that. For the people who actually want to have their home look right, color placement is the answer.

I have a definite plan when it comes to designing color for a home, it goes as such:

• The foyer gets a light neutral color
• The office and dining room are great spaces for darker hues
• The kitchen gets a color that blends, not stands out
• Family/living rooms get a substantial hue that makes them feel right at home.
• Upstairs hallways are almost always a soft creamy color.
• Bedrooms can be any color in the wheel
• First floor hues HAVE to coordinate and transition well from space to space
• 2nd floor hues don’t have to relate to the 1st floor.
• I save all bathrooms to color last which brings me to recycling.

Now this sounds like a lot of colors to choose and like I said, I usually choose about 10 colors for the average home.

Getting back to recycling. After the first few colors I look at the developing palette and see if I can start reusing color but in a different parts of the home. For instance. See the first color on the left? Great blue-gray that perhaps I used downstairs for the kitchen. That color would also make a great choice for the master bedroom. Keep in mind that you can’t see the kitchen color from the master bedroom so it doesn’t matter if you use it again somewhere else in the home.

Another deciding factor to keep in mind is lighting. The lighting in each room will be different so right off the bat your color will instantly look like another color when in fact, it’s not.

As always, keep your undertones the same on the first floor, hold your paint chips horizontally not flat and choose color from 10am -1pm when the lighting is at it’s peak. These ares simple rules to follow when choosing color for your home but if you get stuck, I’d be glad to help you with my Virtual Design service.