To Paint or Not To Paint

To Paint or Not to Paint and What Color?

Every homeowner at some point has gone through the exercise of whether to paint or not to paint something. It could be the outside of the house, the front door, the bedroom, the kitchen, the family room or whatever. Once you are in agreement that something needs to be painted that is when the fun begins or should I say ends. What comes next is choosing the perfect color. It sounds easy but it isn’t!

The color to be chosen for painting is only a small part of the selection process. If it were up to me everything would be one color and that would make it simple. Of course it is not that simple and depending on the room to be painted it can get complicated. Let’s say you are painting the family room which is right off the kitchen. What is the color scheme of the room to be painted and the adjacent room? Things such as furniture, drapes and curtains, pillows, flooring and other accent items become very important. Maybe I am just a stupid guy without an eye for decorating but I could care less about colors. I do know that you should not have plaids and stripes together but after that I am basically color blind. Like I said, one color everywhere works for me.

I cringe when I go to the paint store and there is a wall chart of every color in the rainbow with every possible shade, hue and finish. There are no such colors as red, blue and yellow. The color wall has an endless array of these Hallmark poetic names to describe the countless different shades. I did not know that colors come in families. Then there is the infamous color wheel that you are allowed to take home with you. I cringe again thinking about that darn color wheel. We all have been in the situation where one person (that would be me) is holding the color wheel up against the wall attempting to expose only the desired color. Meanwhile, the other person (that would be Cathy) is trying to picture how this one inch section of color is going to look on the entire wall. God forbid one of the other colors on the “family strip” is exposed and takes away from how the chosen color will look.

The next step once a color has been selected is to paint a test spot on the wall to make sure it is really the right color. Our family room (in case you have not figured this out but we just painted our family room) had patches of different colors from different families everywhere. Well, we ended up with the perfect color called white sage but I will leave it up to your imagination what color it actually looks like (a hint…it is not a shade of white). Cathy takes 100% of the credit for having the patience and vision to choose the right color that blends with everything in the room so everything pops. It looks absolutely fabulous….way to go Cathy.

So if the question ever comes up whether to paint or not to paint, remember the next question is what color? That is when I suggest you grab the color wheel and assume the position.

Until the Next Tom’s Take………………….