Paint Colours and Wallpaper in Our Home

We receive a lot of questions from readers regarding the paint colours in our home, so I decided to write a post dedicated to all of our paint colours and wallpaper used throughout our home.

When we moved into our home in 2012 the previous owner had painted the entire house in Shaker Beige by Benjamin Moore. It made for a wonderful neutral backdrop for our home until we were ready to make our own mark.

When you move into a new home there are always a million and one projects on your list. Cleaning, unpacking, organizing, the list goes on and on. So it’s nice not to worry about jumping into a big project, like painting an entire house at the same time.

Much of our home is still painted Shaker Beige. We like the colour, but an entire house in the same paint colour was getting a little boring. It was starting to feel just a little too, well, beige. So we are slowly working at repainting the rooms our home to better reflect our personality.

The first room we made a change to was our powder room. Originally we painted it Kalmata Olive by Benjamin Moore. We decided we wanted to try something dramatic, and boy was it dramatic. We lived with it for a while, but it was much too dark for our style. If you haven’t noticed, I’m drawn to light, bright and airy. We all make decorating mistakes, and that’s one of the best ways to figure out what your style truly is. It’s a live and learn approach.

So once we decided to free ourselves of the dark, dramatic paint we had given a shot, we knew light and bright was the way to go. We freshened up the room with wallpaper in a timeless geometric print and added wainscoting and crown molding for a little bit of character. It has made such a difference. Painting a room a bright colour doesn’t always mean it will make the room feel bigger, but in this case, it’s the truth. The powder room feels so much bigger and inviting. It flows so much better with the rest of our home.

The next room we painted was the nursery. If you’ve been reading our blog for a while you might remember that we designed a gender neutral nursery for our sweet baby. We decided not to find out if we were having a boy or a girl, it was such a fun experience guessing right up until the last minute, but it made decorating a bit more of a challenge. In the end, we chose to paint the nursery a calming shade of green, Sweet Celadon by Benjamin Moore. This colour is perfect for a gender neutral room, and it paired wonderfully with the subtle safari theme we had in mind. It is light, sweet and serene.

We painted our master bedroom a few months ago when we completed the One Room Challenge. Our bedroom was no different from any other room in our home. I wanted it to feel inviting and airy, plus evoke a sense of calm. So after a lot of deliberation, I finally ended up choosing Balboa Mist by Benjamin Moore. I wanted a colour that was going to feel different from Shaker Beige, but I needed it to flow well with it. When it comes to paint colours there is nothing worse than walking into a home and seeing the discontinuity of a jumble of different paint colours from room to room. Just like your decor, your paint colours should tell a story throughout your home.

If you want to read more about our bedroom makeover for the One Room Challenge, you can read all about our room transformation here:

Week One  /  Week Two  /  Week Three  /  Week Four  /  Week Five

Lastly, let’s talk trim. All of the trim in our home is painted Albescent by Benjamin Moore. It’s a wonderfully creamy white, and it coordinates well with all of our paint colours.