7 Tips for Choosing Exterior Home Colors

Making your home comfortable and appealing is something that every homeowner has in mind. When considering what makes your home look best you are thinking about everything from trees and shrubs to interior decorating, furniture, layout, use of space, organization, indoor paint, and exterior painting.

When anyone first lays eyes on your home, what is the first thing that they notice. Color is one of the first major elements that comes to mind. Color itself, can convey so much about the mood and personality of you and your home. Choosing a color for your home is no easy task, and is extremely important in highlighting the unique features and layout that your home has to offer.

We know that choosing the right exterior for your home can be stressful. So, to make this huge decision a little less daunting, and to prevent corrective paint jobs for potential house paintings gone-wrong, we are going to give you a quick guide for choosing exterior paint colors for your home.

1) Plan Around Your Home’s Fixed Elements

What are the things that you cannot change about your house? Take a look at your roof tiling, steps, driveway, stone, trees, shrubs, and any other permanent features of your home that are either impossible, difficult, or really expensive to change. Since those are the inflexible pieces of your homes layout and coloring, it is best to plan your exterior paint colors around contrasting or complementing those permanent assets.

2) Paint According to Your Home’s Architecture

The last thing that you want is a paint color that is totally jarring to the style of your home’s architecture. Can you imaging a classic Victorian home with a dark orange paint job? Neither can we, and we can’t imagine that you or your neighbors would appreciate that either.

The good news is, the reputable home paint companies of the world have historically accurate color palettes, which can help you match the right color to the type of home that you have. You can even hire a home architecture expert that can give you a list of colors that would work best with your style of home.

3) What Kind of Visual Effect do You Want to Have?

  • What kind of visual effect do you want your home to create?
  • Would you like to appear deeply nestled back in your yard, blending in amongst a few shady trees?
  • Would you rather have a color that makes your home pop right out to the curb?

Color can be used to create the optical illusions of depth with its surrounding environment and can make your house feel bigger or smaller, further or closer to the curb. Deeper and darker colors tend to make your home blend in with the adjacent houses and surrounding greenery, whereas brighter colors tend to make your house pop and stand out, which can make them seem closer than they really are.

4) Shades in Triples

Keep in mind that when you are looking at painting the exterior of your house, you aren’t just picking one color that you are going to use for everything. You are more than likely going to pick two to three other colors that you will use for the accents on your house.

There are three different layers that you are going to be selecting when you are painting the exterior of your home. The base color is the first, which will be the color of your house. The accent color which is used to make doors, stairs, windows, and shutters pop. Then there is the trim color which can be used for door and window casings, roof lining, etc.

It’s usually best if you pick a dark base color, to use a light color for the trim. The perfect contrast in color is what will make your home look striking, in the best way. If you need help selecting your shades, consult an architect or a color specialist to give you an idea of some of your options.

5) Test Before You Paint

If you are just in the initial stages of looking at paint, but have already narrowed it down to a few that you think would be great for your house, you can always put paint swatches to their max test. You can get a good idea of what the paint will look like, without painting at all, by taping the swatches to the front of your house and observing them at different times of day to get a good feel of what that color would look like.

6) Pin Your Favorites as You Go

Pinning your favorite colors as you go is an excellent, organized, and quick way to get some ideas for the color or colors that you want to use on your home. If you haven’t already, go ahead and create a pinboard for home color ideas. Start browsing Pinterest for a variety of different colors on your style of home to help you narrow your selection down.

7) Using the Room Test

Not sure if you are ready to commit to a color yet? Why not test it first?

One of the best ways that you can test a color that you are in the final stages of choosing, is to perform a low risk test of painting a room with it. You may want to paint a room that gets varying levels of sunlight throughout the day so that you can get an idea of what your home is going to look like at different times of day.

 

Now You’ve Got It!

There it is! Now you have a quick and effective guide for helping you choose the perfect color scheme for your home.

Interested in learning more about Stucco in Colorado check out some of our other articles from our Colorado Springs stucco professionals!