Sample Your Paint Colors on Your Own Walls Before You Commit

A paint chip is about the size of a business card. Your living room is not. That gap is why so many people stand in a freshly painted room and think, that is not the color I picked.

Why a paint chip lies to you

Light does most of the work. A wall that faces north gets cool, even light all day. A wall that faces west turns warm and orange in the late afternoon. The same gray can read blue in one room and beige in the next. Add your floor, your trim, your furniture and the bulbs in your lamps, and the color on the wall is not the color you held up under the store lights.

Sheen changes things too. A flat finish soaks up light, so it looks soft and deep. Satin and semi-gloss bounce light back, so the same color looks a little lighter and brighter. Gloss also shows every dent and roller mark in the wall underneath. A color you loved in a flat sample can look different at the sheen a kitchen or a kids' hallway actually needs.

What sampling on your own wall looks like

The idea is simple. You put real paint on the real wall and watch it for a few days. Eddy Hernandez wrote a testimonial on UBG's site after a new roof led to a new paint job. He writes: "We must have picked up 50 plus business cards to try to find the right painters." About the crew he chose, he says: "They come by and work with you to verify your colors,sample your colors, and carry out the project."

That order matters. The colors get checked and sampled first. The project gets carried out second. Skipping the middle step is how people end up repainting a room they just paid to finish.

A good sample is big enough to judge. A thumbnail swatch tells you almost nothing. Here is how to read the one on your wall:

• Look at it in the morning, at noon, in the evening, and again at night with your lamps on.
• Put samples on two different walls in the same room, one that gets sun and one that sits in shade.
• Hold your flooring, countertop or curtain fabric next to it. The colors you are keeping set the rules for the color you add.
• Stand across the room. Nobody lives with a wall from six inches away.
• Leave it up for a couple of days before you decide. Your first reaction and your tenth are often different.

Color is half the choice. The paint is the other half.

Two cans of the same color can behave very differently on your wall. Interior paint made for a bathroom handles steam and wiping better than paint made for a bedroom ceiling. Exterior paint has to put up with sun, cold nights and wind. Bare wood, old glossy paint and fresh drywall each want a different starting coat.

This is where an owner who knows paint earns his keep. Susan Hotchko, writing about her house and fence, says: "Uriel (the owner) was very helpful when choosing the quality and type of paint for my house and fence." She did not have to read the back of a dozen cans. She asked, and someone who paints for a living told her what would hold up.

Jean Smith, another customer, wrote in her Google review: "The color match was great." A color match is its own skill. If you are touching up a wall or matching a room you painted years ago, the old paint has faded, so a sample next to the original shows you whether a new batch will blend or stick out.

The whites and the colors you will not notice

People spend an hour on the accent wall and thirty seconds on the trim. Then the trim looks yellow next to the wall, or the ceiling looks gray. White is not one color. Some whites lean warm, with a touch of yellow or red. Others lean cool, with a touch of blue or green. Put a sample of your trim white right against the wall color and see how they sit together.

The same goes for ceilings. A ceiling a shade lighter than the walls usually feels calm. A ceiling that fights the walls draws the eye up and keeps it there. Sample it on the ceiling itself, not on a wall, because overhead light looks different from side light.

When to bring your painter in

You can sample on your own with a few small cans and some patience. But if you are repainting a whole house, or you are stuck between three grays, it helps to have someone stand in the room with you. A painter has seen how those colors turn out once the job is done.

UBG LLC offers free estimates, and as Eddy's testimonial says, the crew comes by to sample colors with you. If you are weighing colors, call Omar at (509) 833-8113 or Uriel at (509) 985-8609, Monday through Friday, 8 to 3. Tell them which rooms you are thinking about and they will set up a time to come by.