How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

We want to paint the bedroom, bathroom, living room and hallways. Any tips to doing this?

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

We painted every room in our house.

Since we used Benjamin Moore paint I stuck with one collection. The Historical Collection. A close friend is a designer and works w/ BM paint only. He recommended staying within a collection since the colors have the same "tonal range". They work very well together.

Huntington Beige (Hall, LR, DR)
Georgian Green (BR #1)
Phillipsburg Blue (BR #2)
Chelsea Gray (Master BR)
Litchfield Gray (BR)
Van Cortland Blue (Great Room)

We will be choosing a buttery, creamy yellow for the entire basement, a orangey, burnt, rust color for the kitchen and a spa blue/green for the 2nd bath.

Hope that helps

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

We went to Janovic and looked at the samples they had available. We also looked at about 1,000 chips they had on the wall.

We picked all the samples we liked the best, bought a piece of white foam core and those foam brushes and painted a little swatch on the foam core. We narrowed down our choices that way since we could tell right away which colors we liked once they were on the foam core.

We also tended to like the Historical colors more.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

I tried to stay with colors that either flowed nicely or were complimentary. I also chose colors that were in the same position on the swatch. Example - if the swatch had 3 colors - I stuck to the ones in the middle. I did that with the kitchen and DR. In the LR and hallway, I used the same swatch, but one was the lightest color and one was the middle color.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

Well, we are about to embark on a major paint overhaul in our new house. I like the idea of sticking with one collection of colors, but if you want a little more variety, you can try to pull in colors from other rooms to tie the whole house together.
For example, I want a much more dramatic color in my diningroom, which is inbetween my kitchen and my livingroom. I'm going to pull the terracotta color from our floor tiles in our kitchen into the wall color in the diningroom, then paint all the trim a lighter color that will most likely be the wall color in the livingroom. Bedrooms, I just go with their own colors because we're all so different (obviously Ava won't have the same color as JT and me, etc).
Hopefully that made sense!

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

I try to stay within a collection also, but I let our kids pick their own colors. I also stayed with all warm tones which I think makes everything look like it goes together.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

For the open rooms like living room and dining room (and even our hallway) I went with colors that went well together. The open floor plan made it tricky to paint but I love the way it turned out. We did a darker brown for the dining room and one wall of the DR that extends to the LR is dark brown. the rest of the LR is a beige color and is the hallway. The bedrooms are different because we went with bedding or colors we wanted. Same with the bathrooms.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

We stayed with the historical collection basically(all nice warm tones). The colors all compliment each other nicely. I wish I had more rooms for more of the collection

Message edited 3/23/2008 8:37:38 AM.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

I just painted each room w/colors that I like.
Somehow it just worked out perfect - they all compliment each other.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

I found the Pottery Barn colors to be a huge help.

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

Re: How do you choose paint colors when working with several rooms?

I am so undecisive, and we had to paint 3 rooms and the hallway. I started flipping through home decor mags for inspiration on themes and colors to get started. I found catalogues like Crate and Pottery Barn to be especially helpful since I am a big fan of those stores. I finally narrowed in on color schemes for the rooms, and did the ever daunting project of picking from the color chip wall at the BM paint str.

The last room we tackled, I brought a lamp shade in of a color I loved, and just asked the expert at the paint store to help me. The first chip she picked was perfect!