Matching Your Bedroom Decor Colors: the survival guide

Choosing and coordinating the color scheme for your bedroom décor is often a challenging and frustrating task. Say you chose the perfect drapes for your windows and you have in mind the perfect color for your walls to match your drapes, but you can't quite find that color. Then when you finally find a close enough shade of that olive green you've been looking for, you stumbled across the perfect carpet for your room. Only, when you get the carpet in the room, you realize that it is not exactly the color you thought it was. And the list of frustrations go on and on. Does that sound familiar? If it does, don't worry we have some solid advice that would make the whole process a lot faster, easier and more enjoyable. And best of all, once you are finished with one room you can go on to your next project and before you know it your neighbors will ask you to help them with their rooms.

Before we begin though, there are a few guidelines that all successful decorators follow. First, trust yourself and don't be afraid to experiment. Even the most experienced designers never follow their design plan to the detail. Decorating is a lot of trial and error so get on it and start trying different things. The more experienced you get the less tries you'll have to make before you are completely satisfied.

Second, do not strive for perfection. This is true especially when you are out there trying a completely new style for yourself, simply because you should let the new style grow on you and that takes a bit of time. In addition, it is important to remember that when it comes to colors, the number of different shades of colors out there is infinite.
Moreover, under differing lighting conditions each individual color will take on a different shade and might even look like a different color altogether. The reason for that is that all colors are made of mixes of three basic colors: blue, red and green. So you might see inside one color other shades and colors that were used in the mixture to make your specific color. It is all a question of the way light reflects on the particular colored object. The best way to deal with that issue is to simply be more lenient with your colors and look for close approximations when you are trying to match instead of exact same colors.

Third, look for inspiration wherever you can find it: online, magazines, shows, stores and window fronts. Also, talk to professionals including sales associates in the stores you visit. Ask them questions and consult with them, they are a great resource.

So to sum up: trust yourself and don't be afraid to try and experiment with different colors, try to coordinate similar colors as opposed to matching exact colors, and look for inspiration and advice everywhere. As a final note, have fun with it and don't stress yourself out. You can always tweak your initial creation and improve on it later.

Now we can get to work. Before you start you want to have a general idea of what you would want to have in your room. Think about the color scheme, the different objects and furniture you want to have in your room and the layout. To get some ideas you should do some research. Keep the main colors in your room down to about 3 colors (tip: you can still introduce other colors if they work with your main color scheme and occupy a relatively small space. And remember that you are not matching exact colors, rather you are coordinating similar shades of the same colors.)

You should probably look at at least 2 or three different options before you commit to one color scheme. There are several websites that will allow you to experiment with different colors. Try Colour Schemer Online. Also on their Webpage you can look at a galary of color schemes that were submitted and rated by users. See if you like any of the color schemes and start experimenting. Finally, heres is another great resource for inspiration for bedroom color schemes for kids and teenagers: DigsDigs blog , and for adult bedrooms: DigsDigs Warm Bedroom designs

One of the best ways to experiment is to make a small model of your room from paper and color the different objects in your selected color scheme. For example, have one piece of paper to represent a wall another to represent the floor, another for your bed and yet another for your chest, and ... you get the idea. Make sure the pieces of paper are to scale. Meaning that if the walls comprise about 50% of the room, the bed another 30% of the space and the chest maybe 5%, then the pieces of paper representing them will also have the same relative sizes. Then color each piece of paper with the color from your color scheme and see how you like it. If it is still hard for you to see the full picture, simply take a closeup picture of your paper model. Just make sure that the lighting conditions under which you take the photograph approximate the lighting in your room.

Once you have chosen your color scheme of about 3 colors you can start thinking about peripheral colors that you would like to see as a part of a pattern or simply on smaller objects in the room (limit peripheral colors to no more than 5 colors). Then simply go with your color scheme and peripheral colors to the stores and see what you can find. Again, if you want to save time and hustle ask for help from the sales associates. They will always try to help you find what you are looking for and they know the store better than you so they can show you around.

Finally, you can put what you've learned here to practice by first redesigning your washroom which is probably the easiest room to design. You want to look at your shower curtain, your walls, towels, toilet seat, cabinets, soap dispenser, etc' and match their colors. Give it try, you'll love it. Good luck and let us know how it went by leaving a comment.