How I Choose Paint Colours for The Whole Home

Choosing paint can be so hard- but it really shouldn’t be. It’s all about what you like and what you want your home to feel like. One of the first things I like to do in a new home is to refresh the paint and make it feel totally new for our family. But deciding on those colours? Can feel like a risk.

If you’ve missed it- we just moved into a new (to us) home and are going to work our way through making it our own. One of the first things? Paint! In our first apartment, we not only painted out the whole place, but added some wallpaper feature walls. We were there for almost 6 years and I loved it until the day we moved out. When we moved into our first family home, we did a ton of renovations but also painted out the whole house. And now that we’ve moved again into our new (to us) rancher, we’re excited to get painting.

We’ve dreamed up our colour palette in partnership with General Paint and you guys, I’m in love with the colours we chose! I can’t wait to get them on the walls but in the meantime- I wanted to share how we chose the colours for our whole home in one fell swoop and how you can too if that’s something you’ve been struggling with!

Let’s take a look at all the colours we’ve picked, shall we? That’s a lot of colours, right? But it won’t seem like it once they’re on the walls.

Before I get to the tips- I want to mention that the beautiful grey/olive colour (Dakota) is going to be on our kitchen cabinets. Since we’re going for colour(!) on such a large surface, we want to keep the other colours in our space pretty neutral to avoid too much going on. I LOVE this colour and how it’s going to play in the different light that happens in the space- it just has so much personality. And by the way- I’m going to be sharing all the plans for the kitchen next week… because the kitchen is already under way!

Before I pick anything, I really like to spend time on Pinterest figuring out what I like. I made a private Pinterest board and started pinning like crazy. Everything I loved and wanted to feel in my house got pinned there. And then did you know that you can break your boards into sections? So I made one for each room in the house. When that was done, I looked and picked out the things that kept popping up… like white walls… and leather accents… pops of black… and warm, not cold feeling. I pulled together some of the things I had in my home that fit that bill and got dreaming about colours!

One thing I like to do is to pick one neutral colour for the main living space. In all our homes- this has been a continuous colour that carried through the kitchen, dining and living space and the main hallways. I really love this because choosing ONE colour helps it to feel cohesive and open concept, not chopped up. The house that we’ve just moved into did that too- but they did it with a really green green. It’s too much for Shane and I who prefer really simple and neutral colours. I love to go neutral in this space because I like to decorate for the holidays and don’t want to have to think about how it’s going to work with my current decor. I also want to be able to switch up my decor from time to time with the seasons. Like there is SO much green in the house right now, I can’t wait to paint it out!

We learned this in our first apartment where we put up a beautiful light blue wallpaper on the main living room wall. I LOVE that wallpaper still but at Christmas time… red looked really out of place. At Halloween… orange was weird too. That’s really not a problem and I know some people make blues look so darn good, it’s just something that bothered me so it’s worth mentioning here.

In the last place, that meant a light grey through the whole home. In this house… we’ve gotten ourselves excited about going even brighter with a white. I think white is making a comeback! General Paint uses the Colour Journeys system and they have SO many beautiful whites to choose from it made the decision a bit hard, but by bringing the paint chips around to different rooms and holding them up against the flooring, we finally settled on Expert White. We’re using this on the walls, doors and trim as well. The walls will be eggshell and trim and doors are semigloss. It’s such a great white (we actually have started painting it already) because it has no funky undertones. It just reads really clean and beautiful.

But what about colour?! There’s some places I LOVE to go bold. The front door is always something I love to be a bit different with but also… the bedrooms! I think the bedrooms should be a haven for whoever lives there. Shane and I went dark navy in our last bedroom and loved how cozy it felt so we wanted to go dark again. For us, that means black. I’m SO excited to get this black up on the walls and cover over the beachy stripes that are in there right now. The black that we chose is called Ravenwood and I like how it’s not a super deep deep black but feels a bit bohemian.

And the kids rooms will reflect them as well. Aubrey asked for pink and Emmitt and Windsor for blue. I worked within their colour choices and chose a beautiful light peachy pink called Peach Bloom for Aubrey and a deep grey blue called Myth for the boys. I chose more sophisticated tones in their colour to keep the rooms from being too crazy bright and they are so excited to see their dreams come to life.

I’ve had people say that I should have gone with brighter colours for our kids’ rooms since that’s what they love. But I have a couple thoughts on this. First- once the paint gets on the wall, it ALWAYS looks brighter. And second- when I was working with kids way back before I had them, we always painted our spaces in neutral colours. I had been told that the more neutral colours were better for development and focus… and the brighter colours are more stimulating for kids which isn’t exactly what you want at bedtime. Just my two cents though ;) You can pull in brighter colours with things like sheets and throw pillows that are easier to swap out as their tastes change.

In the basement, we went with a warm light grey instead of the white we are doing everywhere upstairs. I know you’ve probably heard lighter is brighter, but I really love how they grey plays in shadows and creates a cozy feeling which is what we want down there. We also do have windows in the basement (it’s walk out) so I’m not worried about it feeling like it being a cave. The colour we’ve chosen for that space is called Row House. On screen you see a lot more clay undertones, but the paint chips read cleaner. I’m excited to test it out!

In the guest room, I’m going for another dark and bold colour but this time just on an accent wall- it’s called Forrester and it might be the colour I’m most excited about in this whole palette! We did a dark green bedroom for the kids space in our last house and I really loved how well it worked with our modern style. I can’t wait to see it come together!

So there’s the colours we chose and why I chose them. If I can give you ONE big tip- it’s to spend time looking at photos to figure out what you love. By having a plan when you head into your house or when you paint one room- you can make the whole home feel cohesive and somewhere that you love to be! Do you have any tips? I’d love if you shared them!