If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting our home, you may notice that we have pure white walls…nearly everywhere. I say nearly because we did actually get brave and paint the walls in our guesthouse something other than white (namely a warm caramel color and something similar with a pinkish-hue in the bathroom out there). But after 5 years of owning this house, we have never gotten around to painting the walls in our house.

And believe me, it’s time.

With a big, grungy dog and a small child at home, plus the usual wear and tear to a house, it’s rather necessary to paint your walls every so often. In fact, the bottom part of our walls where the dog is always laying on her back with her feet on the walls, we need to paint at least once a year. We did do a bit of dog proofing to our walls a couple years ago, but even with that, things still get dirty.

Add to that the fact that it’s about to become a construction zone in our house in the next month or so which is going to mean plenty of dust and funk — and our walls will likely really want some new paint after that. We’re getting new windows all over the house, which will replace the original paper-thin single pane windows that the house was originally built with. Yes, I hate to let history go (although we’ll be saving at least one to hang as art and possible repurpose another couple for garden stuff) but they have zero insulation value which leaves the house extremely drafty in the winter — and about half of them are cracked or just starting to fall apart which is not good.

And since we’ve got a rockin’ new look in our living room (corner leather sofas are über-comfortable, by the way, and perfect for napping on), and additional accent rugs all over the place (things inherited from a recent death in the family), we figured this was the culmination of elements we needed to make some drastic changes in wall color. And if we’re going to paint everything, we’re going to do it right!

Lucky for us, a friend has actually volunteered to help us. We didn’t have to beg or anything — in fact, she’s told us that she enjoys doing it so much, she’d actually be insulted if we didn’t call her to help. Those are definitely the kind of friends we really NEED around here! And trust me, we reward our helpers handsomely with food and drink!

There is so much to consider when you’re selecting a paint color, and I do think that if you’re going through this process, you should try out a tool like the Color Visualizer from Sherwin Williams. It is seriously cool and probably the best of the tools out there like it (and I think I tried nearly all of them). You can upload a photo of a room in your home, then select the space which you’d be painting, and go through the color charts to pick out the color you think would work best in the room. They even include coordinating colors for trim and accents.

Now it’s not foolproof and the lighting and hues you capture in the photo will reflect when you try out new colors, but you should be able to get a general idea before you end up buying about 30 sample cans of paint!

I don’t have a good prediction shot yet for the living room (and we’re not sure if we’ll do just one wall in there or what) but I’m thinking of going a bit crazy and Caribbean in the office, with something aqua or blue.

Maybe we’ll even paint the icky, dark ceiling something light and bright too. Add in my wall unit idea and then we’re talking– or perhaps I will go with the idea I had recently about putting in a corner desk by the door and more bookshelves in this corner so it would end up like a library room with a desk…

And in the entry, which is a high traffic and therefore highly dirty space, we’re thinking a nice light brown with some cream accents (but I so far only went for adding the wall color since the trim will be similar with a slightly darker hue).

Maybe after all this, we’ll even be inclined to hang up some photos!

Have you stuck with white or off-white walls in your home? Or did you spice things up with colors you love?