Our sitting and dining room walls are white but we painted the ceilings red and blue respectively. We left a nine inch white border between the tops of the walls and where the colour starts on the ceilings. It was my wife’s idea and I was very skeptical about it but now I think it works a treat. We need to get some paintings, hangings etc. to break up the white a bit though.
They are white right now, but since watching trading spaces, we want now to paint them.
I think it would look nicer, especially with the frames on the wall.
We can’t decide yet what color.
I rent an apartment, but made sure that I was given free painting abilities before I started.
When I moved in, the living room area was a muted olive green, which looked horrible against the pear yellow kitchen (somewhat open concept).
I knew before I even moved that I wanted a purple living room. And I made it so. It is often the first thing people comment on when they see my apartment for the first time. And it was after I had painted that I read that creative people like to surround themselves with purple. The colour is actually called California Grape, and is gorgeous!
The kitchen colour didn’t look so bad after the purple was done, but I finally got around to painting it a creamy yellow, which contrasts beautifully with the purple.
Haven’t gotten around to any other rooms, but I have to have colour. Watching Trading Spaces, as vanilla said, does inspire a great deal!
Mostly white, still; we agreed to start buying the house from our landlord a few months back, and then got the ok to start painting. The bedroom went first; it’s a nice tan, with green trim and a green wall. Looks much, much nicer than it sounds.
My office is going to stay white; everything in it, from desk to curtains to bookshelves, is a different shade of dark brown. Any color on the walls other than white, and the whole room would have a chocolate mocha meltdown.
The big question is the living room. We’ve got all dark red (cherry) furniture in there, and we recently picked up a beautiful bolt of burgundy fabric, which is currently trying to convince me to make it into curtains. But we still haven’t decided on a wall color as of yet; my boyfriend is leaning toward maybe a dusky shade of yellow/orange, and I recently started to picture a shade of grey. But first, we’re gonna get the curtains done, and see what it looks like with the walls white.
Fun stuff. And yes, once again, Trading Spaces is to blame for all of this.
I’m all for color. I just bought a house a little over a year ago, and I’m finally making good on my wishes to use color in my decorating.
Here we have:
My marigold bedroom
My maroon living room
My creamsicle orange kitchen
Since that batch of pictures was taken, I have also painted my dining room an ochre yellow (you can see the dining room in it’s white stage in the living room picture, imagine it in the gold that’s in the chair’s tapestry) and I plan on painting my office a slate blue.
Color color color! 
It depends. First of all I don’t like to have any dark colours on walls, trims maybe, but never walls and doors. It just makes the room dark. We like to keep the place nicely bright. 
Colours are either earth tone or pastel. All the ceilings and doors are white.
We got lucky when we moved into our rental house. The living and dining room (separte) were the same wonderful shade of almost robins-egg blue. However, we were UNlucky when we painted the bedroom. We were going for a soft yet spring-y yellow, and got damned near lime green. Unless the computer that mixes was wrong, we took that as a lesson to never buy cheap paint again. The kitchen/breakfast nook are white, as is the bathroom. Well - our bathroom has VERY shiny (like mirror-polish) black tile on the walls to a height of about six feet. Very strange - my husband can see himself perfectly when he’s at the toilet!!
We did re-paint the dining room last summer. We used Laura Ashley (which we had used in our apartment with similarly wonderful results) sand #4 above the chair rail and taupe #5 below it. They are neutral colors, but pretty strong (not at all pastel) - they are a wonderful backdrop for my husband’s mask collection. The thing we loved is that, after two coats, the walls were the EXACT SAME color as the paint chips (unlike our lime green cheap paint).
I’ve never used Ralph Lauren paint, but I can say from my own experience to buy good paint.
Go Color!!
Our walls are a buttercream color, and we have hunter green accents.
My SIL recently repainted our daughter’s room…now it’s a medium pink (not nieon, not pastel) with a fairy wallpaper border up by the ceiling. My SIL also painted a “fence” for the headboard on the wall, complete with fairy stickers clinging to the slats.
It’s a very cute room. Every time I watch Trading Spaces I want to redo our bedroom, but I’m not sure how.
Bedroom-blue
Dining area -Clay
Living room-not quite white. Vanilla-ish.
Accent wall in living room - Hunter green.
Bookroom-deep yellow.
Mud room-white w/ bright red-rose cabinets.
Tile floor-almost a Saltillo pinkish/orange-ish color
Colors are your friend.
Glidden Paint has a really cool CD disk for your computer (you can buy it at Home Depot for about $5) that lets you use photos of your house/rooms and then you can “paint” on the computer to see how it would look.
Once you find a color you like, you can email it to Home Depot and pick up the paint…there is also a paint calculater that tells you how much paint to buy.
We found the program VERY helpful, as the colors from a one inch swatch never look the same when they are up on the wall. With the program, what you see on the monitor is what you really get!
(Plus it was fun to see our house painted lime green with orange trim…we got a good laugh at imagining our neighbors’ faces if we did that!)
Buy the way - some rooms just look better white, but not the whole house. Depends on carpet and furniture colors.
great paint job jadis!
colour definatly. grey with teal trim bedroom, light aqua sponge paint with dark aqua trim library, nostalgia white living room (tanish white) with fortune cookie trim.
I second the coolness of Jadis’ wall colors.
My house is in several states of remodel - we moved in to a completely wood panelled house that (fortuantely) has nice solid plaster (not drywall) walls. So far we’ve redone the:
Bedroom - purple
hallways - brick red
bathroom green tile with the nontiled parts purple and green spongepainted areas.
Livingroom olive green
The kitchen is going to be about the marigold of jadis’ bedroom, and I’m still on a tossup about the other two bedrooms. One is going to be my office, so I want something that I can deal with looking at 9 or 10 hours a day. The entire downstairs (which is laundry, huge livingroom, and bathroom is done is gorgeous captians board, so I’m not going to change that. I am going to be putting in about a zillion more lights, though, as I can’t stand the dark look of it.
I really dislike white walls, they seem very apartment-y. But I do prefer colors throughout the house to be somewhat coordinated, so each room flows into the other, and it doesn’t feel like I just landed on a different planet when I walk through the doorway.
Color for me! The room I am sitting in has blue, two shades of green, three shades of peach to salmon to orange, one sort of burnt ochre, and three shades of violet to dark purple…and white.
Did I mention that I’ve painted large graphics style murals on two walls? Not to everyone’s taste, but I like it.
The living room has three walls with almond and peach and white, and the family room has terracotta and white. One bathroom is white, and the other is a very soft mint green.
(I also wear hawaiian shirts on occasion)
Call me a color person. Kitchen is painted “daiquiri ice” (just like the daiquiri ice at Baskin-Robbins!) with white floor, black appliances and bright red everything else (except where it’s chrome.) Family room is paneled, alas, but I’ve put in a red sofa and lots of navy and dark green accents, along with light oak furniture. Dining room is pewter on the walls, apricot and dark green in the drapes and furniture - sounds odd, I know, but looks fabulous. Daughter’s room is bubblegum pink above the “waist” and denim blue below, with a hippie-floral wallpaper border that picks up the yellow and spring green in her accessories. Living room - two walls in dark raspberry, two in sand, furniture is Colonial blue and dark oak. Master bedroom - sage green and plum, ditto the bathroom. The other bathroom came with an amazingly retro “poured floor” that looks like the gravel in the bottom of an aquarium - aqua, turquoise and dark blue - and the fixtures are turquoise. Not much I could do with that, since I didn’t want to rip everything out, so I painted the walls light turquoise and decorated with white and yellow daisies. Studio/office is exactly the color of hot chocolate - sort of a pink-y pale brown, with green and beige for accents. Next up: the dreaded laundry room, which currently sports 1970 silver mylar wallpaper that has GOT TO GO! I want to do something really whacky in there, but I don’t know what yet.
renting…so of course have ugly white walls…I CAN"T wait til I can buy a place so that I can have walls any color buy white. I hate hate hate white walls (same goes for light brown carpet).
I didn’t mention this before (because the OP was already rather long), but ‘flow’ is important to me also. That was one of the reasons (in addition to wanting to brighten up the space) that I went with white in the hall. All of the bedrooms open onto the hall and, because the hall is neutral, I can use any color I want in the bedrooms. I also used a neutral wallpaper (a damask pattern in tan and white) in the foyer because two rooms open off the foyer. My dining room on one side had beautiful wallpaper when we moved in – kind of a colonial print with flowers and birds in pale olive, pink, maroon and pale teal. It was white below the chair rail, but I repainted the wainscot pale olive (matching the very nice drapes that conveyed with the house. So, when I started to decorate the library (opposite the dining room on the other side of the foyer) I wanted to be sure the three spaces flowed. I didn’t want to use green or maroon (the obvious choices). So I picked up the pale teal in the dining room and brightened it to a medium china blue for the walls of the library. And I picked fabric in a similar print and color to the dining room wallpaper, but brighter and darker, for the valances in the library. It worked great – you can stand in any of the three spaces and look into the other two and it looks wonderful from every aspect – not ‘choppy’ at all.
My other ‘flow’ challenge was the kitchen, living room and sun room which all open out into each other. The kitchen had nice wallpaper (cream with a medium blue pindot) but a mediocre border (pink and blue floral). So I put up a different border (roosters!) with a lot of celedon and olive green in it and used celedon valances in the bay window. So the pale olive paint I used in the living room is picked up by the kitchen wall border and curtains. My living room furniture is dark apricot and green floral upolstery and the window valances in there are a dark apricot/ light terra cotta. I painted the sunroom (which opens off the living room) a bright terra cotta/ apricot that just matches the living room valances. And I used a lot of greenery in decarating the sun room and put pale olive cushions on the wicker furniture in there. So all of those rooms look great together.
My last challenge was the master bedroom. The master bath had beautiful navy blue floral stripe wallpaper, but the master bedroom was painted white with an accent wall wallpapered in green floral wallpaper. Boring and it didn’t match!! the previous homeowner left all of her leftover wallpaper but there wasn’t enough of the master bath paper for the accent wall and the wallpaper is discontinued. So this is what I did: I chose a taupe color out of the bathroom wallpaper and used that to paint the bedroom walls. Then I cut the leftover bathroom wallpaper into stripes and used them to border the bedroom walls. I had to do a lot of piecing and just barely had enough but the results are absolutely perfect. I love my bedroom!
I last thing I did for ‘flow’ was to keep all the woodwork in rooms that open into each other the same. In the kitchen/ living room/ sunroom the woodwork is stained wood. In all of the rest of the house, the wood work is navajo white.
BTW – I’m enjoying hearing about everyone’s houses – they all sound so beautiful! Dopers clearly have great taste!
Jess
Definitely colored.
We had to paint our whole house when we moved in. The previous owners smoked, and hadn’t painted in years, so we had to wash all the walls thoroughly and go over them with that primer stuff called Kilz to seal the walls.
Our living room is a medium blue, and the dining room is papered on three walls, with one wall a dark navy. The trim is natural dark wood, like Jadis has. We have lots of windows, so it’s not too dark.
The kitchen is a bright lemon yellow, with navy blue curtains and trim. The cabinets are light tan wood.
Our bedroom is a light blue, rag-painted for a marbley effect. It sort of looks like faded blue jeans.
My one daughter’s room is white, but I stenciled pink and purple hearts and bows on her walls.
My other daughter’s room is painted peach, with two walls papered in a floral print.
My son’s room is tan, with baseballs stencil-painted all over the walls in a totally random pattern, like they’re just flying all over. We also have that baseball ceiling fan in his room. The fan blades look like bats, and the light looks like a big baseball.
The family room has exposed brick on one wall, so we painted one adjoining wall dark brick red, and the other walls a medium tan. It goes well with the furniture.
Gotta have color!
We rent and we’ve painted the walls. We are long term renters and the landlord really doesn’t care.
mmmmm, colors. Gotta have color on the walls. Looking around, the only room that is white in our house is the entryway, and that only because it goes up two stories and I haven’t a ladder tall enough (or the desire to paint that high up, truth be told). I’ve got brightly colored rooms as well as lighter colored ones. Now that I think on it, all the bright ones are from the first year or two here (we’re been here almost six). Maybe I’m mellowing in my old age. 