Before you paint...

I'm no pro, but I did learn a few things when choosing colors and painting our main floor before we moved in 4 years ago. To be exact, I learned 2 things.

*Never get a gallon of paint based on how the paint chip looks on your wall. It's not a big enough area to really get an idea of what it would be like if the whole room was painted that way. Narrow your paint chips down that way, but I'd say take the final 3 and then buy tester pots and paint an area a couple feet square on several walls. 

*Look at the sample painted areas several times a day (and at night), in different kinds of light. My lovely neutral tan that I picked for my kitchen 4 years ago turned out to be gross pinkish brown under the incandescent lights at night. Boo.

I also picked up another tip this round of painting. Actually, it's better than a painting tip. It was a painting epiphany. It was while I was priming the basement. I was all like, "Priming isn't so bad. I just do everything the same! No cutting in, no worrying about marking up what I've already painted." It was necessary to give myself little pep talks while priming because it got sooooooo tedious. Anyway, it was then that the epiphany hit. I realized that if I did the closet ceilings the same color as the walls, I WOULDN'T HAVE TO CUT IN. Best painting tip ever. Maybe it's one that everyone knows, but not me. The closet ceilings in the rooms upstairs are a nice crisp white. Blerg.

As you can kind of see in these pictures, the inside of the closet is all the same. I didn't save myself a TON of work cutting in, but I'm super slow at it and it makes me tense, so any little bit I didn't have to do was a triumph.

{This color is 50% Silver Drop by Behr.}

{This color is 50% Angel Blush, also by Behr. It took me a few tries to find a pink that was sufficiently warm as well as super pale, but I'm so pleased with it now that it's coming together.}

Bonus tip: Getting only a percentage of the color added (like 50% in both the rooms above) always seems to work better for me than getting the same exact color that's on the chip. Once the color is on the walls and reflecting the same color from everywhere, it always feels more intense than it was on the chip. So I cut the color in half and then when it's all over the place, it feels like I thought it would feel when I was just looking at the chip.

So anyway. Like I said, I'm no expert and maybe everyone is all like, "Duh. Those aren't tips, those are common sense." Maybe there's some novice painter out there that will get something from them, so the haters can just shut it.

Thanks for reading!