How to Choose a Paint Color For Your Home

Choosing an exterior paint color for your home may seem like a simple task, but there's a lot to consider.
Written by Elan Mcafee
Reviewed by Carrie Adkins
Choosing an exterior paint color for your home seems like a simple prospect on the surface, but it can have a profound effect on your day-to-day life. After all, you spend a lot of time surrounded by the walls with color setting the stage for some of the most important memories of your life from family barbecues to intimate, heart-to-hearts on the front porch.

Setting a mood

Step 1: Consider how you want the color to make you feel. Each day when you pull up into your driveway or garage, your home’s color is the first thing to greet you.
Think about how you want to feel when gazing on your house, whether it is calm or energized or somewhere beyond that spectrum.
Step 2: Research the psychology of color.
HGTV
has some good insight in how certain colors in the home environment make you feel. Red, for instance, stimulates the emotions while blue has a calming effect on the viewer. Explore colors that evoke the emotions you most want to feel.
Step 3: Narrow your choices. While the color green stirs up thoughts of growth, nature, and new beginnings, there are lots of different shades from which to choose.
This is where you personal preferences come in; maybe you love dark forest green but cannot stomach lime. Eliminate colors that don’t appeal to you from your list of potential hues.

Aesthetic considerations

Step 1: Survey your surroundings. Take a critical look at your home’s exterior and landscaping. Are there dominant colors in the accent pieces with which you want to complement? These considerations may help to further narrow your choices.
Step 2: Use color swatches to visualize your options. Get some paint color swatches with gradients of the colors you like. Hold them up to your house and imagine the total effect of each specific hue and also ask for advice from trusted friends and family who are familiar with your sense of style and personality.
Step 3: Commit. Ultimately, you must make a choice and paint. Be aware that the color changes slightly as it dries, and rest easy in knowing you can always change your mind and restart the process later.
When you choose a new paint color for your home, it is a carpe diem moment, seizing the day and control of how your home exterior makes you and others feel. It also makes a statement about you and your family, marking you as classically stylish, bold and daring, or connected to the earth and nature. Work through the process to explore your options, so you are more likely to take pleasure in your choice and project the image you most cherish. And once you've found the perfect paint for your home's exterior, you can continue the magic indoors by updating paint in the dining room, living room,
bedrooms
, and hallways.
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