The right paint and lighting choices can make a big difference in how comfortable you feel in your home. Lots of bright, harsh lights, or too dark paint colors can be distracting. But softer lighting and warm paint colors in the areas where you like to relax can make you feel cozy and comfortable.
Let’s take a look at how important proper lighting and paint selections are to your home.
Lighting
Light can make a space feel warm and inviting or it can be distracting. It can be functional or provide ambiance for a room. Light also reflects off the color choices of your furniture and paint colors to make them look better or worse.
When making lighting choices for each room, it’s important to consider the entire room. What colors are in the room? What is the purpose of the room?
For instance, you’ll want brighter light and maybe a few directional lights in your kitchen to help you see better when you’re cooking. You’ll also want bright lights around your bathroom mirror to help you see better when you’re getting ready in the morning. And work areas usually require brighter, more directional light as well.
On the other hand, you’ll do better with softer lighting options in your bedroom where you want to relax, in a reading corner, or even in the living room to provide ambient light while watching TV.
When choosing lighting options, it’s also important to take the natural lighting the room receives into account. If a room receives lots of natural light during the day, you may not need bright lights. You may prefer a more ambient light to use in the evening.
Various bulb choices can affect the type of light you receive in a room as well. Here are a few options to consider:
- Incandescents – provide warm, yellow-amber light. They make reds, oranges, and yellows brighter while muting out blue and green color tones.
- Fluorescents – flat, cool light. This type of bulb will enrich blue and green colors.
- Halogens – most resemble natural light. These white lights make all colors sharper. They provide a more natural shift from natural daylight to artificial light.
- LEDs (Light-emitting diodes) – these lights come in both cooler and warmer tone availability. There are even “smart” LED options that allow you to control the color wirelessly.
As you can see, making the right choice with lighting options can make a big difference in the way your home looks and how comfortable it feels.
Now let’s take a look at how lighting works with paint options . . .
Paint
Paint colors are another way to bring warm and cool tones to your home. When selecting a paint color for each room, there are a few things to consider.
If you’ve ever looked at paint samples, you know that not all blues look the same. Every color has various shades that make it cooler or warmer. Colors are blended to create colors you’ve never seen or heard of before. Deciding which of these many samples is right for you can be an overwhelming task.
When selecting paint colors, bring the sample cards you like home and hold them up to various pieces of furniture and décor in the room to see if they match, blend, or clash. It’s much easier, and less expensive, to change your paint color than to change your furniture.
Once you’ve narrowed down a color or two that you like, ask the paint store for a sample. Most of the time, they’re happy to provide a small sample of the paint for you.
Brush some of each color you’re considering onto a wall that gets the most light in the room, either natural light or artificial light, or a combination of both. Colors look different in various types of light. Just because you think the sample looks good with your furniture, doesn’t mean it will look exactly the same once you get it on the wall.
By painting a sample of the colors you’re considering, you can see how the light reflects off of it and how it looks in sunlight and/or artificial light.
If you really like a paint color but don’t like how it looks with the lights in the room, you may need to consider switching out your bulbs. This will instantly brighten or soften the color of the paint.
Making the proper lighting and paint selections for each room in your home will make your home feel more comfortable; a place you enjoy spending time. It’s important to put a little time and effort into making these selections as they will last you a long time.
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