You might have noticed from my first post, but my living room walls are green, and not a muted sage green or an olive, but lime green. Glidden's Lime Sorbet to be exact. It's funny but when my mum came over and helped me to paint, her first comments after we were finished were, "I feel like I'm under the sea!" lol Touche Mother! So why did I choose such a daring color for my living room walls? Simple. It makes me happy.
I believe that when you're choosing the wall color for a room there are 5 factors to consider.
First, you want to think about how much time you spend in the room. It just so happens that the living room is where I spend most of my time when I'm at home. It's where the kids play, it's attached to the dining area, it's where we read stories, and I do some of my *cough* DIY projects (hey! I don't have a garage or a yard people, I'm working with what I've got!). Anyway, my point is that since the living room is essentially where I spend most of my days it should be a color that is most appealing to me. I'm not going to pretend that my hubby and I have exactly the same taste in decor because we don't, but he graciously defers to me because he knows how much time I spend here compared to him. Just like he spends more time in the office, which is why we have a picture of him as one of the Star Trek crew next to Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock up in there. (To be fair he's not even a fan, he just had it taken in Vegas and it's so funny we burst out laughing every time we look at it). So if you're redoing a room that you spend equal amounts of time in with your spouse, you probably should have more equal input (please don't force your hubby into having a pink bedroom that's just wrong).
The second and most important factor when picking a color is actually a question. Here goes...
How do you want your room to make you feel?
Simple right? Not rocket science, but just as vitally important in my book ;) You can look online and see what colors mean what emotion if you want, and you'll be missing half the fun. The fun is in choosing your desired emotion and then really thinking of colors and things, and the colors of those things that evoke what you're looking for. In the case of my living room, I chose the emotion "happy." More specifically, I wanted it to feel like that vibrant kind of happy that screams, "I'm so happy to be alive today!" because after all, I spend half my life in this room, shouldn't it make me feel glad to be here? In my little outlook of the world, green is a happy color. Why? because it just so happens to be my favorite color. So from there I had a springboard to explore what type of green I might like.
The best part of examining color with this method is that there are no right or wrong answers, as long as you are being genuine to yourself then it will be right.
OK Laura, I hear you cry, even if I am genuine I can make a humdinger of a mistake. Yeah you can, and here's why. (Here comes #3...)
Before you rush out buy a can of Eclectic Eggplant, you need to think about palette and budget. Your palette is all the other colors you want to tie into your room, and your budget fits hand in hand with this, because you have to be willing to make a lot of changes to the rest of your room if your dream color doesn't work with your current palette. Sadly, if you can't reconcile your budget and your dream, it really isn't worth painting... yet. So you save and you plan, and you'll get there if it's important enough to you. If not, then thanks for playing :) When it comes to picking accent colors I tend to be a lot less of a hipster and I say use the color wheel, it's your friend. It's one of those things I think should be taught in school really, but of course it isn't. So study up on complementary, analogous, and triad colors and you'll be glad you did. Having said that sometimes you just know what you want, and that's fine too. When I finally decided on Lime Sorbet, I knew almost straight away that I wanted to work coral and turquoise into the room. So I made a vision board, or in my case a word doc. of images with those colors and periodically looked at it to make sure that's what I really wanted.
The fourth factor is flow. You should be able to move through your house and feel like it just flows. Do you love your buttercup kitchen, but then think you might want a red laundry room coming off of it? Well, that might be a bit too jarring. I definitely had to think of flow a lot since the dining area is attached and I knew it wasn't going to be Lime Sorbet because to me, despite it's delectable monkier, it's just not an dining color. So I transitioned into my chic pale blue grey dining room by incorporated hints of deeper blue grays in the living room and throwimg hints of lime into the dining room, et voila! It flows.
The last factor I'd say consider is lighting. My living room gets a ton of natural light and can handle the vibrancy of lime, whereas my windowless bathroom couldn't. Again, simple but important :)
And that's all there is to it. I'm not saying that EVERYONE should go out and paint their walls something as bold as lime green, just that well maybe you should consider it.
