Cover your furniture
First things first: before you even start, you better take time to protect your expensive furniture. The best way is to move everything to the middle of the room and to cover it with an old canvas or nylon furniture covers, both of which you can find in any DIY centre or a paint store. There will be lots of dust and paint marks everywhere, so you better remove your carpet and keep the room as empty as possible while work is in progress.
Good wall preparation
Preparing your walls properly is crucial if you want the best possible results after repainting. This is the most boring and the most exhausting part of the job by far. Depending on the current state of your walls, it could take up to a few days to treat all uneven surfaces, small cracks, or holes in your walls without seeing any significant difference. Buy a tube of caulking, fill the cracks, and use your finger to remove the extra caulk. Simply clean all treated surfaces with a wet sponge and let it dry overnight.
Buy good quality paint
If you want the color to last longer, especially if you plan on using darker colors, it’s a good idea to spend more money on quality paint. Don’t hesitate to do a thorough research and ask around about different paint brands. Check out forums or customer product reviews for unbiased results and recommendations. If you are uncertain of what paint to buy or how to apply it, you could always ask professionals for advice if you require quality painting services. They will be glad to help, and they will charge you less because you already prepared walls for painting.
Color choice
Be original when choosing the new colors. White might be the easiest to maintain but it’s far from innovative and interesting. Don’t be afraid to use dark shades of blue, red, even black, especially if you have enough natural light in the room. You can combine these dark shades with lighter creamy ones in diagonal sections, thus providing a unique contrast. Take care not to mix greasy paints with a gloss finish with matte ones or a lime wash because, style-wise, they are not compatible.
Optical illusions
Light colors make the room appear bigger while dark ones make it “shrink” in plain sight. You can use this optical illusion to reshape your room and to improve its look, especially if it’s very narrow or the ceiling is too high. For instance, you can paint side walls with an antique pearl shade and make the main wall a statement wall by randomly splashing black and midnight blue over a matte black base to create an interesting effect. Again, if the floor is darker, choose brighter shades for ceilings, and the other way around if the room is high enough.
Strange geometric patterns
You might have hated geometry in your high school, but when it comes to paintjobs, it could easily become your best friend. Playing with different geometry patterns could change the balance in the room, especially if the bed or other main pieces of furniture are off center. You can use your children’s room to experiment with geometric patterns on the walls, as children love innovations and experiments.
There is a delicate balance between not wanting to work too hard and not wanting to spend a lot of money on a project, and the two are usually mutually exclusive. Just because you don’t want to work too hard on something doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try planning and executing a couple of your own DIY project from time to time. Painting walls of your home isn’t exactly rocket science but rather a creative and fun way to spend your free time and do a bit of manual labor.
