House Paint Color Guide: Our Top Picks for Every Room

Finding the right paint house paint colors is so hard. I have spent hours looking on Pinterest, clicking through paint companies’ online color swatches and even holding the physical paint chips from the hardware store up against my own wall before deciding on one.

I’ll go to the paint counter, so confident in my pick of one nice, soft greige called some stupid name like Cashmere Island, then I get home and it looks dull and yellow and like it should’ve been called Camel Spit instead. Like, really though, how could it look so different? And how is it so difficult to find the right shade of white or grey?

Still, we persevered, and have now painted just about every room over the last 14-ish months in an effort to make our house’s color scheme more cohesive (you can read our tips about how to do that here).

Now that we’re about to sell our little yellow house, we figured it would be fun to give a rundown on all the paint colors we’ve used throughout, so that if you, too, are stalking every blogger that’s ever used the color Edgecomb Gray by Benjamin Moore, you can add another inspo pic to your list and wonder if it’ll look like ours or like a rogue smattering of ancient Egyptian clay on your wall.

Mudroom

The mudroom went through quite the transformation in our time here, second only to our kitchen renovation. It was just a bare sunroom with an enormous storage bench in it.
The bench was okay but not a good use of space, so we eventually pulled it out and added a smaller storage bench and built-in desk (which we plan to blog about soon) to maximize the space a bit better.

We closed off an unused door that went into our bedroom from that room and installed cubbies and a coat rack on the blank wall that was left.

All the cabinets, coat wall and storage bench are the color Riverway by Sherwin Williams, and the wall is Stonewashed by Behr.

Living room/dining/kitchen

This was one of the first rooms we did! It was originally navy, which we kind of liked, but rightly guessed that the whole space might look bigger if it was a more neutral color. This new, grey/beige color is a colormatched version of Benjamin Moore’s Edgecomb Gray but with Behr paint.

It’s kind of a roundabout way we got to it, because we were trying to match the color to our kitchen paint color, but we didn’t know what it was because it was already painted that color when we moved in. So, I had it colormatched and then later found a whole gallon of it in the shed labeled Edgecomb Gray and could’ve just used that. Ugh, at least I know the color name now, though!

Main bedroom

Our bedroom plank wall is basically our pride and joy. You can find the DIY on how we did it here, but the color of the accent wall is Chimney by Behr. I love that at night it looks black and in the morning light it looks navy. It’s made our bedroom so cozy and modern.

The other walls (which were paneled wood we spackled over) are painted in Simply White by Behr. This white color pulls a little bit yellow, so if I were to do it over again I’d go with a more cool white, but it still looked great next to our accent wall.

Guest bedroom

We haven’t blogged much about this room because we really didn’t do anything to it except paint, but we covered the previous bold teal with Tanglewood by Behr. It’s a nice, simple grey that goes with a lot of different color schemes.

Bathrooms

We covered the dull yellow that was originally in the bathroom off of our bedroom in Aesthetic White by Sherwin Williams, and painted the vanity Muted Sage by Behr.

The muted sage color is a good example of how lighting can change the look of a paint, because it’s the same color on the walls in our guest bathroom and on the vanity in our main bathroom, but in pictures it looks slightly different.

I still love it in both, though!

Front door

This one is probably my favorite color in the whole house. This front door update was done on a whim with one of the paint samples we’d picked for an eventual exterior paint job (that we obviously aren’t going to get a chance to do now), and I love it so much I wish we did it earlier.

The color is Van Deusen Blue by Benjamin Moore.

Trim

All of the trim in our house is the same – it’s just the base ultra pure white by Behr. That makes it easy to remember because it never needs tinting so will always match room-to-room, and keeps everything unified throughout the house. The finish on that one is semi-gloss.

Bonus activity: Next time you go to the paint store, if you’re going with someone else like your spouse or a friend, play this game. Grab like four swatches each and have the other one guess the pretentious paint names. Some of our past favorites have been sharkskin, dandelion wish, authentic tan, and shy smile. Like, shy smile?! How is that a color? Also works with nail polish.

A note on finishes:

The sheen, or finish, on all our walls is eggshell, except for our bedroom accent wall which is matte. The matte paint gets scuffed pretty easily on that wall, but we didn’t mind as much because it’s hardly ever touched being that it doesn’t have a door on it and it’s not in a kids room or living-type room, and we love the matte look.

Generally, remember that the duller sheens (so matte or flat for example is the dullest) are the hardest to clean and easiest to scuff up, and the higher ones (satin, semi-gloss) are easier to clean but obviously, more shiny so are used more on things like cabinets or trim.

So there you go, that’s everything we used in this sweet little starter house of ours. Let us know if you’ve got any questions on our color scheme or anything more specific!

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