Picking Out Paint Colors

Choosing paint colors for entire house...takes a lot of time! I have had ideas for colors for some of the rooms for a while but actually deciding on them is a whole other animal. My first stop was Sherwin Williams to look at colors swatches and gather ideas. I wanted to go to Sherwin Williams for two reasons; I knew their staff would be knowledgeable and because they carry a line of colors selected by HGTV.

I love watching HGTV for inspiration on design and color, so it seemed natural to check out their inspiration booklets for paint. Instead of browsing the books, I took one of each kind. I walked out of that store with an entire bag of paint chips!

The two books that were my favorite were the Urban Organic and the Coastal Cool. Both books offered neutrals paired with fun, bright colors. I loved almost every color in the Urban Organic book, especially Parakeet and Hazel

Sherwin Williams has 8 different pairings of colors by HGTV. These books are a great place to start with paint colors and are an easy way to take many paint chips home

Next step was trying a few colors on for size. I bought a 5 pack of canvas from Michael's Craft store (with a 50% off coupon!) and 4 small tester paint samples (Sherwin Williams had a 40% sale this weekend so each tester was only about 4 bucks)

I picked a warm, sunny spot in the dining room and got to work. Its getting pretty chilly here in Michigan so having a sunny spot really helped the paint dry quickly

I thought this yellow would be great for one of the upstairs bedrooms but after seeing it in a larger scale, I changed my mind. This yellow was reading to much like mustard to me- which was not the mood I wanted to set

Here is the Latte color in the living room. It just felt a little too dark for us. We plan to have this color in the living room, foyer and all the way up the stairs, so it needs to be lighter for that dark stair area. We decided to go one shade lighter for a paint called Bagel. Latte sounded better but Bagel looked better

The top two colors, Summit Grey (Kitchen) and Sea Salt (Master Bedroom) are winners but the bottom two are out. Bee yellow (Upstairs bedroom) was not what I wanted and Latte (Living room) was a shade too dark for us.

This is what our bed looked like this weekend while picking out paint colors. Kind of a hot mess but I think trial and error is really the only way

It took Kyle, me, the computer for inspiration and the entire paint collection from Sherwin Williams to narrow down the options. We have most rooms decided (for now) and we plan to share our selections later this week.