If you’ve just bought a new home, you’re probably thinking about how to best personalize it. And, like many new homeowners, you may have decided to repaint the interior, which provides you with a prime avenue for personalization. However, you will likely find that picking the perfect interior paint colors can be highly vexing. Not only are there 100s of interior paint color options, but it is often difficult to visualize how a specific color will affect a room and mesh with your furnishings and art.

With more than 25 years of interior painting experience in the Naples, Florida, area, the professionals at FCI Painting are long familiar with new homeowners’ struggles in choosing the perfect interior paint colors for their new spaces. To help you with your interior paint color choices, they offer you the following ideas to help simplify your approach to the task:

Understanding White Paints

Many homeowners opt for white-hued paint for their interior spaces because of their relative simplicity and how they easily complement the colors of furnishings and artwork. There are numerous white variations, which typically fall under three categories:

• Clean—without tinted undertones.
• Warm—tinted with yellow, rust, pink, or brownish undertones.
• Cool—with green, blue, or gray undertones.

Clean whites work best for those who want to highlight a room’s furnishings and artwork and work well on ceilings to complement other wall colors. Warm whites help make larger spaces seem cozier and enhance the lighting of rooms that don’t receive much natural light. Cool whites can help rooms look larger and more open.

If in doubt about which white to use, test the different types to see which one looks best with other colored features—like furniture—of the room.

Speaking of Furniture

If you’re planning to paint with color, don’t forget to assess how potential choices will meld with the primary furnishings and artwork that will be in the room. When colors clash, it can be unsettling and make a room uninviting. As with white paints, you should test different options to determine which will complement your furnishings and other colors.

Use Colors to Emphasize the Mood You Want to Set in A Room

Similar to white paints, the numerous colored paints can be categorized as either warm, cool, or neutral. Warm colors evoke a sense of warmth, as orange, red, yellow, and combinations of these and similar hues simulate sunlight, fire, and other heat sources. Cool colors, which primarily fall under the blue, green, light purple, and combined shades thereof, emulate the sky, water, and ice. Warm colors work best at making rooms feel cozy and intimate, while cool colors make rooms look more expansive and open. Warm colors are also more stimulating than cool colors, making them work best for areas used for socializing. Cool colors, on the other hand, convey a sense of relaxation and calm, making them a perfect choice for bedrooms and bathrooms.

Choosing the Right Finish

Along with color, you’ll want to consider the type of finish used for your paint choices. Most people typically use flat paints and satins (also known as “eggshell”) for walls and semi- and high-gloss finishes for trim work. This finish scheme is effective for creating accent because the higher glossed paints create more sheen that draws attention to the surface. Most people avoid higher glosses on walls because they’ll make any imperfections more apparent.

Don’t Forget to Consider Accent Walls

While planning the color scheme of each room, don’t forget to consider whether any of the walls should be painted differently to create an accent wall. You can design an accent wall to serve several different purposes, including:

• Make the wall a central focus of the room to highlight unique architectural details or furnishings.
• Enhance the visual appeal of the entire room.
• Create fake space and add apparent dimension to the room.
• Make smaller rooms look bigger than they are.
• Create separation in larger dual-purpose rooms.

Turn to Naples-Based FCI Painting for Your Interior Painting

We trust that our basic pointers will help guide you in choosing interior paint colors for your new southwest Florida home. If you continue to struggle with determining the right options, consider consulting with FCI Painting. With more than 25 years of exterior painting experience in southwest Florida, we’ve helped thousands of new homeowners come up with the perfect color schemes for their interiors. To learn more about our expertise, contact FCI Painting online or call us at (239) 435-1001.