For the first time in my life, I actually live in a house where I can do what I want with the walls. (Always used to live in rentals. This one is a rental too, technically, but the landlord will let us do what we want, within reason, and the plan is that we will buy the house eventually.) I don’t really know where to start. Where does one go to get ideas? Is there a good process for doing this? Are there any good books, websites, etc? I used to watch Changing Rooms, but I never saw anything on there I would actually want in my house. Ditto Trading Spaces. My husband’s idea is just to immediately paint everything white, which I vetoed.
Go to a paint store or a paint department in a store like home depot. By the paint swatches they always have brochures with different paint schemes.
They even make paint now that looks like stone, leather, clay, etc.
Hm, I was going to suggest that you watch Trading Spaces! I know that I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from that show – not copying the show exactly, but more like, “Ooh, I like that idea, but I’d do that over there, and in a different color, and use a smaller pattern, and not do it on the whole room.”
Another place to find inspiration is in a specific piece – a painting, pillow, rug, etc. that you really love. Make it a focal point in the room, and get your wall color from that piece. I did that in my master bedroom: I have a poster that I bought, and got a comforter set that picks up a lot of the same colors. Then we took one of the pillow shams to Home Depot and used the Behr color-matching machine thingy, and that gave us a paint color that matched the comforter. We picked that color and a contrasting color (in our case, the comforter is sort of a deep garnet red, and the contrasting color is a beigey-taupe), and painted our room those colors. It looks great, if I do say so myself! And it all started with a poster.
I’m sure there are other places you can look for inspiration - good luck!
Whatever you do, don’t change your wall colours to yellow
Behr (the paint company) has a bunch of web apps for color choosing. The one on the far right, “Inspiration Library”, is fun to play with. You pick a color scheme and then you can pick which parts of the sample room are which color.
There are a gazillion shows on tv that will give you ideas. Another of my FAVORITE ways to get ideas is to cruise model homes. They have fabulous decorators do those places.
My mom and I used to paint murals for people in their homes. We also used stencils and did faux finishing on walls. It was a lot of fun and we got paid very well. There are so many gorgeous things you can do with paint! Too bad you don’t live in my neck of the woods, I’d love to help
I used to walk by an apartment building that had big living room windows. On the 2nd floor, the tennent had one wall painted red (specifically, flower pot red). Just the one wall. The others were off white.
It looked really cool. I want to that one day.
Now that I think of it, I had a friend who painted his living room when he moved into his apartment. All the walls were green, but 2 opposite walls were a slightly different shade of green. It was a neat effect.
When I was in Lowes the other day, I saw a wall-covering that looks like pages from old books. You simply tear chunks off, and glue them to the wall in sort of a collage effect. It looked really cool. I’m thinking about using it in my library.
Go to stores that sell wallpaper and wallpaper borders, and look through all of the books of samples they have. A lot of the books will show photos of rooms done up in various distinctive styles. Even if you don’t actually use wallpaper, you will get lots of ideas. Your husband will have fun looking at the “Men” books, which will show lots of masculine themes (sports, ships, military, etc).