Interior Painting Residential Painting

How to Choose the Best Interior Paint for Your Home

Posted on February 1, 2022

When choosing colors for a home, it is easy to get lost in the minutia of options. Do you match the carpet or the furniture? Should the walls shine or scatter the light? In today’s modern paint world, the options can cause analysis paralysis. Today, we would like to offer a few tips to help you decide what you want from your interior paint and how to get it.

Select the Sheen For the Room

When we discuss sheen, we’re really talking about how well the paint reflects or absorbs light. Most interior paints are available in a variety of sheens, all the way from a totally unreflective flat to a highly reflective high gloss. Depending on the space, selecting the wrong sheen can be a substantial problem.

For example, in a southward facing sunroom with lots of windows, a high gloss paint will reflect the direct sunlight. Since most sunrooms are designed to be brightly colored, this effect can actually make the room uncomfortably bright. Conversely, a small den with a north facing window might benefit from a light shade semi-gloss paint, as bright, reflective colors tend to make spaces feel larger.

Select the Color For the Use

Some paint experts suggest using color to augment the intended use of the space. Specialty paints, such as blackboard, glow-in-the-dark, and sanded paints can add dramatic visual effects to a space. By selecting a color complimentary to the texture, these paints can be used to create one-of-a-kind spaces. For example, themed rooms, such as a bathroom decorated in shells, might benefit from a sanded paint that can be integrated into the design.

Use Specialty Paints

Modern paints do more than just color a wall. Recent technological advances have led to special additives that when added to paint, give the paint certain characteristics. For example, many bathroom paints now contain antifungal properties that can significantly reduce the potential for mold and mildew growth. Others contain polymers and other additives that create a water-resistant coating, preventing the buildup of moisture in wet locations.