A Guide to Choosing the Right Paint for Your Interior

Wondering what paint is best for your interior home remodeling? This guide will discuss selecting the best paint for your home’s interior.

1. Understand the Difference Between Interior and Exterior Paint Types

Before proceeding to paint the interior of your home, it is important to understand that there is a difference between interior and exterior paint types. Interior paints generally contain fewer chemicals than exterior paints, making them safer for you and your family. Exterior paints contain organic chemicals that are toxic once exposed to the outside environment. These chemicals help them to withstand UV rays and extreme outdoor conditions. Therefore, conducting appropriate research before opting for any paint is important.

2. Design a Color Scheme That Suits Your Home

After selecting the best paint type, the next step is to design a color scheme that matches your home. While many paint chips are in the market, only seven colors are on the paint spectrum. Therefore, to avoid creating an unpleasant mix of colors, selecting colors that match items in your home is important. Select items within your home that convey a feeling of comfort and connection, like your favorite scarf or pillow, and find sample strips that match these colors. Choose one of the colors as your wall color and use the rest for your finishing and fabric. If you love the artwork, you can also create a color scheme by selecting the colors of art pieces in your room.

3. Consider The Space

Before painting your home, it is vital to consider the parts of your home and the layers of coats they would require. For areas of your home prone to more usage and traffic, like living rooms and parts with several doors, it is essential to choose paints that can withstand more pressure. Children are known for touching and soiling walls and even painting or drawing on them with markers or crayons. Therefore, the paints used for the children’s rooms should have stain-resistance properties. Other home areas, like kitchens and bathrooms, that require regular cleaning to preserve against mildew, mold, and marks should be painted with interior paints capable of withstanding the pressure of these exercises.

4. Match the Mood of the Room with the Correct Color

The psychology of color is a major obsession among paint experts. It is said that you select a color according to the purpose of the room and the intended mood you wish to create. Social rooms, like family and living areas, dining rooms, and kitchens, are best painted with coral, daffodil-yellow, and cranberry colors. Meanwhile, violet, sage-green, and sky-blue are most suitable for private rooms like bedrooms, home offices, and powder rooms. Depending on the tint, orange colors are also great for private rooms and can create calming effects on people. Yellow and blue are inviting and suitable for the living room.

5. Consider the Number of Coats to be Applied

As a general rule of thumb, the fewer coatings you apply on the walls, the better. Therefore, choosing quality paints with a smooth texture that offers you the required coverage between one or two applications is crucial. Select quality paints that provide high coverage, transitioning from a darker to a lighter hue. Choose paint primers within the same shade as your wall, and apply the primer before applying the paint for extra coverage. Only one coat is required if you are repainting the wall with the same color of paint; however, if the one is new without any prior coating, then the required number of coats is two if you use a primer.

6. Create the Best Appealing Visual Effect with Your Choice of Finish

Although modern-day paints are produced with enhanced stain resistance properties, traditional practices provide that satin finishes are ideal for walls because of their cleaning ease. Finishes are used to build visual effects on entire walls. For instance, if you paint one part of the wall with a satin or flat finish and the adjacent area with a semi-gloss finish, both in similar colors, it creates a velvet or corduroy effect once the lights hit the walls. Conversely, you can paint your ceiling semi-gloss and flat walls to create an appealing matte and sheen contrast. The more light-reflective the finish, the more your ceiling will feel higher. However, remember that the more gloss you apply, the higher the sheen and the more attention you draw to the surface. When used correctly, color and gloss can help to enhance your interior’s best assets.

7. Understand Your White

White colors come in multiple varieties. Pure whites are produced without tinted undertones and are generally preferred by people looking to display their furnishing and artistic skills. They are also excellent choices for creating neutral field overheads on ceilings. Other types of whites include cool and warm whites featuring pink, brownish, and rust undertones. Warm whites can be used to make bigger spaces look cozier. Cool whites are also great for opening up spaces. Experts recommend testing several at once to discover the ones that work best with other colors in your room.  

8. Use Your Colors Architecturally

One of the best techniques to use color to transform a room is by enhancing its architectural features. Mantels, arched doorways, windows, doors, built-in bookcases, wainscot, and molding allow you to include another layer of interest on your colored walls. To create subtle emphasis, you can make doorways and molding one step darker or lighter than the main wall. Reddish browns offer a sense of visual connection from your dining to the front door through various cased and uncased openings, allowing a glimpse of the sunny walls of the entry. Another way to draw attention is by painting a metallic glaze over an existing painted element, such as your ceiling medallion. Bronze and copper finishes are highly translucent and give off bright shimmers that boost your home’s architectural features.

Painting is a central part of home renovation and requires expert attention. If you want to add a new coat to your walls, we are your best bet for professional painting services in New York. Our services span the five boroughs of New York and Bergen County, in New Jersey. So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today for your free quote!