Replies

1. 
   CTI | Jun 14, 2004 02:41am | #1

   Love the tomato dining room - it will be very cozy - and the celery LR. Sorry I can't help you with the celery color as I'd like some too and I think I'm going to have to go with a mix of colors and textures to get what I'm looking for. Paint is so tricky so expect to experiment. I don't know why they decorator couldn't help. What you will want is a transition - maybe using plants - from one room to the next going in either direction. One idea is back-to-back plants with a different color depending on which room you are in, for example reds in the dining room and gray and greens in the LR of approximately the same size. 

1. 
   CTI | Jun 14, 2004 02:49am | #2

   Darnit, I wasn't finished. When you are doing bold colors start with one wall. Sometimes a one, two or three wall room of a dramatic color looks really good with something totally different in that room like a glassware wall or cabinet.

   Lighting also can make a huge difference, but it will take a year to check that out if you depend on natural light.

   It sounds like a really fun project!

2. 
   WayneL5 | Jun 14, 2004 03:23am | #3

   I'm not that fluent in color selection but I have managed to make some choices that turned out fine.  Here are a few tips that helped me through my difficulty.

   First, colors always look brighter and bolder on walls than they do on the little chips.  So, if you think you've found a color you like you might start off with a lighter version than you might otherwise think.

   Second, I've heard many times that room lighting affects color, but never really appreciated it until I started picking paint and carpet for my new home.  It really does matter as much as everyone says it does.  What I do when picking colors is to pick out in the store some chips (or carpet samples) that look to be just about what I want.  Then I also pick some others around it -- a little warmer, a little cooler, a little lighter, a little darker, a little bolder, a little milder.  Then I bring them all home and place them in the room.  I look at them in the morning light, daylight, and at night.  With carpet samples I always decide and return them the next day to be polite, but the paint chips sometimes I live with for weeks.  The final color is almost never the one that looked the best in the store.

   Different paint manufacturers have different ranges of colors, so I always try to go to a number of stores and pick chips from all of them.

   Of course, you can always test a quart of the color you "finally" settle on before committing to the entire amount.  For adjoining rooms, it would be nice to paint the samples so that you can see both from the same vantage point.

   As an aside, really dark colors don't cover as well as others.  Red is especially difficult to get good coverage with.  So, for your tomato, tint the primer, if you need primer, with some red and even black pigment.  You may need 3 or even 4 coats of red to cover, so don't be surprised if you have to go back for more paint.

3. 
   WayneL5 | Jun 14, 2004 03:25am | #4

   By the way, I did a room in Dutch Boy 2G-3 Bunch of Cloves, and it was a nice shade, not far off from celery.

4. 
   USAnigel | Jun 14, 2004 04:22am | #5

   I would suggest you work from the items with the smallest color range. ie dining room tables only come in 7 or 8 colours and most are shades of wood (brown) carpet is less limiting with 200 hundred plus then paint in the 1000's, some paint companys have a supply of large chips once you have reduced your selection. For sure get away from the "standard"off white.  The strong colors you are thinking of sound interesting. Go for it!

5. 
   TBP | Jun 14, 2004 10:19pm | #6

   Last year we were decorating a vacation home and decided to go with strong colors. We love it and everyone who visits comments on how much they like it but also say how they never would have risked such bright colors. Hey, you can always repaint something that doesn't work and we only have one room that we don't love. As nobody else minds it we've left it alone. Since the place is out in the country we decided that we would buy all the paint at the local Ace hardware so we were limited to their palatte which probably made things a bit easier. We decided on a butter-cream color trim throughout and went with the off-white ceilings in most rooms. Then we just started pulling off color samples and laying them next to each other to see what we thought would work. As it turns out our dining room is a red that we refered to as Salsa and only as we were painting the ajoining kitchen in a pale green did we start calling that Guacamole. Still, it really looks GREAT. Using the same trim paint throughout the house makes every color transition work without issue. The one thing I will say is paint the entire room before you decide if it works or not. We had one room that I questioned until the very last bit of paint was up. Now, I love it. I can also tell you that since living with all this color for almost a year when we had to paint the living room at our primary house it got the strong color treatment. Our contractor was horrified when we showed him the colors (sage green ceiling, dark bronze crown moulding, and yellow-orange walls with original mahogany windows and trim) but he was really impressed when he saw the finished product. Again, when the ceilings and walls were first done and the old white crown moulding was still there it was scary, but the bronze pulled it all together.  Just have FUN!

1. 
   ErinB | Jun 15, 2004 01:15am | #8

   hello, i am erin.  this is my first chat, not sure how this works, so please excuse me.

   i am trying to decide on a color for a small (6x6') bathroom with 9.5' ceilings. yes, 4' footed tub, wall-hung sink and toilet are all in there.  i like strong colors, bbut want to avooid looking jaundiced in the mirror each morning. are there colors i should not use in a bathroom?

   Edited 6/14/2004 6:17 pm ET by erin

1. 
   WayneL5 | Jun 15, 2004 05:27am | #9

   I'm not sure the paint color matters much as to how you look as much as the lighting.  Fluorescent lights make you look really, really bad.  Like you know how bad you look in a hotel bathroom?

   Probably anything not too bright would be ok for the walls.  Warm colors, like red, are probably ok even if dark.

2. 
   aimless | Jun 15, 2004 06:25pm | #10

   Erin,

     It depends on your skin tones as to what colors make you look jaundiced. If you are like me, then certain blue toned colors and black make you look sickly. Other folks look nasty with yellow toned colors. Generally speaking, the colors you like naturally are the ones that make you look good.

   That said, the lighting is more important than the color you paint your walls for how you look in the mirror. Of course, if you wear makeup and put it on under a nice full spectrum light and then go work in a cube with flourescent lighting, it won't matter that you had nice lighting in the bathroom because the makeup should be applied under the lighting conditions it will be viewed in.

1. 
   ErinB | Jun 16, 2004 11:04am | #11

   thank you for your responses.  i guess this is going to be a trial and error(s) proposition.      erin

6. 
   Tish | Jun 14, 2004 10:54pm | #7

   Travis, I had adventures with red paint last winter.  They are chronicalled somewhere on this forum.  I found out how important it is to prime.  Like you, I had lived with "landlord white" all my adult life, and didn't think I needed to primethe clean white wall that I painted "grenadine."  The color never did cover evenly.  After advice from the inspired people here, I was sure to prime when I painted another room in bold bright yellow, green and blue.

   My living room and dining room are really one big room with white walls, deep green drapes and furniture and red rugs.  Red and green look very nice together, though I do joke that we never have to decorate for Christmas.  If your red and green rooms are very open to each other, you might try placing a few accents of the other color in each room.  Maybe a celery table runner in the red dining room, for a few red throw pillows in the living room.  If the contrast is too high use deeper shades of green and lighter tints of red in the accents.  If there is not a lot of visual connection between the rooms, it might not matter at all.

    

7. 
   shywoodlandcreature | Jun 23, 2004 11:39pm | #12

   Hi Travis,

   I see you've had just about all the advice I gave to someone else who is looking for colour ideas in another thread. As for the green you're looking for, have you looked at Restoration Hardware? They use a signature colour that may be just what you're looking for - a lovely silvery, sagey green (won't work in my home, alas, 'cause the lighting is just not right.) I adore the combination of soft, celery-green with bright red - one of my favourite compositions is a large celadon plate I own, which I fill with ripe cherriers in the summer, moving on to deep purple plums in the fall. The contrast is quite gorgeous IMO.  

   [Sigh... now I want to blow off the rest of the workday and go play with colour!]

   “We would like to live in the past, but history prevents us”.

   John F. Kennedy

   
   

   ---

   Edited 6/23/2004 4:41 pm ET by Sandra

1. 
   Candyce | Jun 30, 2004 02:37am | #13

   Have you all tried using the color picker at http://www/behr.com?

   It's fairly simple to use - and you may find just the right shade of green you are looking for there.