Paint color help !

May 18, 2021 7:02 AM

We are planning to paint our kids' rooms soon and would love advice on color choices. They're boys, age 2.5 and 6. Inspired by this question, we are not doing a theme - we are thinking we'll pick a neutral color for the walls and stick with white furniture. We're leaning towards a light grey but would love any input. Photos here. (Maybe someday the kids will keep their rooms neat too.) Thanks!
posted by kdern to Home & Garden (11 answers total)

I'm biased, as I have various shades of blue walls in my house, but I'm gonna say blue.

Blue is both calming and conducive to creativity, and there are just so many wonderful blue paints out there, from faintest grey-blue to rich super saturated dark blue with undertones of teal or black or just deep true navy. (I would just do an accent wall if you go for one of those, probably.) By the way, in my recent paint-buying I've found that online pictures are only faintly similar to the in-person effect, so don't get too married to a color you've only seen online: get inspired and then get some real sample sheets from the store, or paint patches on the wall.

A lot of kids' furniture is white, which pops beautifully against any shade of blue.

And it's like jeans -- it functions as a neutral if you want it to, while still bringing the beauty and liveliness of a color.
posted by fingersandtoes at 7:34 AM on May 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

IMO, bright block colors with white trimmings and ceilings are great for bringing harmony and order to a room. I'd suggest a brighter and warmer yellow for the room with the bay window and a sky blue for the other room. I'd also recommend that you either get some really big posters or some wallpaper for just one of the walls in each room. On the webs, there are tons of ideas for toddlers rooms, but unless you have the means to redecorate every three years, there is the fact to consider that toddlers are only toddlers for a limited time period, and what is suitable for a two-year old is not necessarily suitable for a six-year-old. Well you already know that, now imagine a twelve-year old or a seventeen year old. And mostly, despite all efforts, childrens' rooms will be a mess most of the time. Creating a visual focus on one wall will make a semblance of order in the space. I just found a huge free poster about biodiversity that I plan to put up in a guest room soon (I don't know yet wether I want to frame it). It has beautiful pictures of rare local animals and will be great to look at for a young child, forever.
posted by mumimor at 7:34 AM on May 18, 2021

With the reddish-brown-stained built-ins in this room, I'd suggest a greige color with some red undertones would work nicely.
posted by xingcat at 7:35 AM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Have you asked the boys? We always asked our kids before painting. It's their room, afterall.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:39 AM on May 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

My fave color combo for any kid room is dark green with black and white. Like this room. A dark green chalkboard wall, and lots of black and white accents. The rug color is the same as your rug color, just pop a graphic area rug over it. You could do the other walls in a really nice grey, grey and green is really beautiful.
posted by the webmistress at 7:53 AM on May 18, 2021

I went with pale pale green with white trim for my son's room and it's worked out well -- it was super cute when he was little, and has been accessorized in a bunch of different ways as he grew. He's 18 now and it's still been a decent backdrop now that the room is filled with stuff he chooses.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:59 AM on May 18, 2021

We did pale blue for our boys' room, with one wall painted with blackboard paint. They really like being able to write on that. We put some bright space decals (which can easily be removed when they outgrow them) on the upper portion of the blackboard wall where they can't reach to draw to lighten it up.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:47 AM on May 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

Owl grey + warm orange accent works nicely.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:33 AM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Another vote for a light green (I was thinking a pale sage) as it would be soothing and go nicely with white furniture and the wood shelves.
posted by brilliantine at 11:03 AM on May 18, 2021

I think dark greige (like Sherwin-Williams Dovetail ) will look great here, very smart with the white and also it'll hide a multitude of sins. It's also calming and won't clash with art that you hang. Best of all, it'll grow with the boys and won't read like a child's room when they're older and may not like things that tend toward a nursery vibe. There are people who think it's a crime to paint wood, but I'd also paint that cherry colored built-in white to match the rest of the room.
posted by quince at 2:03 PM on May 18, 2021

Go with specific paint color recommendations that you can find online. Like quince's Dovetail recommendation above. Do not randomly pick colors from a 1000 paint chips because they never look the same on the wall and most of the colors are not right for walls. I can tell sometimes in a house where someone picked paint colors from chips instead of designer recommendations, looks like crayon colors.

Buy a quart or sample and paint a big square on the wall or a big piece of posterboard to see how the paint looks in the room and against your furnishings. One big thing I've learned in 25 years of home ownership is that it totally does not matter what the tile or rug or furniture or paint or whatever looks like in the store or whether you like it, it only matters how it looks in your house next to your stuff. For example, there are many gray things right now that look ridiculous in my house because there is no much brown. I found a fantastic gray/brown tile that still looked blue next to the wood floor in my house. Undertones are a serious thing.
posted by RoadScholar at 9:04 AM on May 19, 2021