When is a house like a book? Always, because people will constantly judge it by its cover!
House color schemes are much more important than you think. They set the entire tone for your home and are the first things that visitors will notice when they come to visit.
By changing your paint scheme, you can make your old home look absolutely brand new. However, it can be difficult to pick the right colors to help your home stand out in Phoenix.
Wondering which colors are best for your own home? Keep reading to discover our complete guide!
Keep It Light
While you may want to bust out a really wild paint scheme to help your house stand out, most homeowners want to blend in with the neighborhood. If you’d like to go with some “safer” colors, you should consider keeping it light.
For example, one classic combination is to combine beige siding and bright white accents around your windows. This creates a pleasant contrast while still giving you the type of home that would fit in nicely just about anywhere in the East Valley.
You can always experiment with other light colors as well. If you don’t like the color experiment, it’s easier to go from lighter shades to darker ones as needed.
Find the Balance
It can be daunting to choose new house colors if you’ve never painted an exterior before. Fortunately, you can break the thing down into three essential elements.
Your exterior house colors should include a dominant field color, an accent color, and a trim color. Balancing these colors together helps individual colors pop while helping your entire home to stand out.
Maybe you have a few favorite colors and you’d like to work around them. Alternately, you can bust out a color wheel and get creative with the colors you use. As long as those colors are balanced, your home will look great.
Let History Repeat Itself
If you have an older home, then you may not want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the paint. Instead, you can simply stick to the colors that the home previously had.
How do you know which colors to go with? A renovation professional can safely dig down and determine the original paint colors.
If you don’t want to do this, or you want to get a little more creative, you can simply research popular housing colors from your home’s original era. This gives you a kind of “starting palette” of colors to choose from!
Historical accuracy may help you keep things pretty simple, too. For example, classic ranch homes usually only had 2 colors.
For further inspiration, you can always take a stroll through some of the city’s historic neighborhoods.
Focus On Shade
One of the biggest parts of choosing exterior paint colors goes beyond the color itself. Before painting, you must decide on the exact shade that you want.
This is basically a 2-part process. The first part involves deciding whether you want to go with lighter or darker shades for your home. Typically, you will have an opposing shade to serve as an accent color.
Once you settle on the general shade and colors, you need to get more specific. For example, there is a world of difference between ivory, cream, and eggshell, despite all of these being shades of white.
Ultimately, choosing exterior paint colors is a lot like choosing interior ones. You’ll want to get the shade “just right” if you really want to impress visitors and neighbors.
Accents On Point
We’ve mentioned accents a few different times. And traditional wisdom holds that you only have one color for your accents. But what if you’d like to buck tradition and do something wild?
For a new spin on classic accents, you can go with multiple colors. The trick is to use the main house color as a kind of mediating influence.
Imagine having a bright turquoise door and lavender-grey shutters. At first, these colors sound like they would seriously clash together. But a house painted white helps pull it all together.
Because white is a relatively neutral shade, it serves as a kind of blank canvas for multiple accent colors. And both lavender-grey and turquoise are in the blue/purple color spectrum, so these colors subtly complement each other instead of clashing.
Visualize Ahead Of Time
Maybe you’re one of those lucky few who can perfectly visualize new house colors for your exterior. Most of us, though, need a little help
Local painters can help you visualize what a new home will look like in a variety of ways. Photoshop and other apps can take your existing home photos and imagine how things would look with different colors and shades.
Many paint companies offer similar apps for you to use inside the store. You can have the “best of both worlds” by finding the perfect paints within your town and then having a local professional paint your home.
Neighborly Inspiration
As we said before, while crazy paint schemes can be tempting, most people want to blend in with the neighborhood. And that means you can use your fellow Phoenician neighbors as an inspiration for your colors.
If your whole neighborhood has light shades and conservative accents, then your flamingo-pink home may look more tacky than wacky. The trick is to blend with your neighbors without copying them entirely.
All of this goes back to your shade of choice. Maybe your immediate neighbor has an ivory home and you go with eggshell or beige. You’ll still blend in with a lighter-colored home, but it won’t look like you’re biting your neighbor’s style.
House Color Schemes: Renovation and Innovation
Now you know how to choose the best house color schemes. But do you know who can your home in a way that brings your renovation dreams to life?
We specialize in every aspect of painting, including both interiors and exteriors. To see what we can do for your home, request a free quote today!
We can’t wait to help bring your dream house color to reality!
