How to Decorate with Colour Without Painting a Room!

Are you a fan of color but afraid to use it? Well, if that’s the case, today I’ll explain how to decorate with colour without painting a room! Okay – you do have to paint a small portion of the room, but it will take less than an hour….promise!Let’s take a trip down memory lane to when it looked like THIS! OMG. I can’t even believe I’m showing this to you… but our rec room was a full blown dumping ground for a long time. It wasn’t until we did KonMari on our entire home that it started to take shape as a space we could actually use and enjoy.

It’s basically supposed to be a room that doesn’t take itself too seriously… so we’ve gone ahead and incorporated color into the overall plan. And of course, we cleared out all the junk 🙂

Phase Two was our awesome white bricked wall under the window. I still love the way it brings texture and a bit of a contemporary feel to the room. It has definitely acted as a source of inspiration for us to continue mixing different mediums.

Which brings us to today – Phase Three, otherwise known as ‘The Indoor Window Wall’.

Yes. The previous owner of our house added these kinda cool ‘windows’ into the basement stairs. I love the spirit of the idea. But the execution was a bit shoddy. The trim is gappy and uneven (as it is in almost every single room in our house) and they are made awkward by the fact that they aren’t centred on the wall and go right to the ceiling.

Add in that horrible door to the left and a weird jog in the wall to the right and you have a recipe for U.G.L.Y.

Dan and I sat down measured the wall and then roughly graphed it out onto paper with a pen and pencil. Then we walked through all the things that were cool about the wall (the windows) and all the things we didn’t like about the wall (too many uneven lines, awkward ‘zones’ due to the jog on the right wall, weird sight lines due to the horrible door).

Here are my tips for Decorating with Colour!

Use colour to give awkward spaces a purpose! Dan said, what if we deliberately turned that wall into a desk area? It makes sense that a desk would be ‘under a window’.

Use colour blocking sparingly to create symmetry. The eye LOVES symmetry and a subtle (or in our case, not so subtle) shift in hue on a wall can really trick the eye into thinking something is prettier than it truly is.

So off I ran to grab my Frog Tape and paint. We settled on this amazing blue by Para Paints called Cuff Link. I truly think it is too blue for a whole room – but for a pop of colour? Perfection.

I simply measured from the edge of the windows down with a level, drew a straight line and taped it off. Two coats of paint later – my weird little windows had both Purpose and Symmetry!

You can see how adding the stripe of colour allowed us to place the shelf to the right and it now seems anchored in the space – as if it has its own little zone of white space beside the blue.

Try Painting One Piece of Furniture a Bold Hue – We had great success painting our television credenza in a gorgeous hue of bold pink. I never ever thought I’d have a piece of pink furniture, but in this room? It TOTALLY works. Here’s the post about how we Upcycled an old Bureau into this Awesome Playroom Credenza!

Bring Colour Into a Room Using Artwork – A blank canvas on the wall (for e.g a neutral tone like white, grey, black or beige) is the perfect place to add massive pops of colour without overwhelming a room! In our living room for example, we have incorporated lots of colourful artwork, but the overall feel of the room is still quite neutral! In fact, we made this room over for less than $100 using bold pops of colour. You can see the entire Series by Starting here at this Inspiration Post!