What Colors Must You Paint A Small Living Room To Make It Look Larger?

Sitting in a small dark living room will give you a similar feeling to being in prison.

You’re a law-abiding citizen, you do everything you can to avoid being in a jail cell, so why replicate its interior when you don’t need to?

Living in a large city means you’re not going to have much space available in your apartment unless you have a great job and make a lot of money.

You’re reading this article though, so you feel like your small living room should be maximized.

Efficiency is the name of the game.

Painting any room in your home can take a long, long time.

When I last had that pleasure, dinosaurs were still grazing on trees.

The worst thing?

Spending all those hours moving the furniture out of your living room, preparing the surfaces, taping around the light switches and covering yourself in more paint than the walls – only to then have the trauma of doing it again when you realize the walls feel like they’re caving in.

It fills me with excitement, too.

Each color seems like the one.

Even the disgusting options, I have that conversation in my head, strategizing on how I can wield it to do my bidding.

I’ve come to appareciate that sometimes you need to cut your losses and know when to retreat.

Trust me, it takes a long time reaching that point.

In this article, you’re going to learn to understand the difficult journey of picking color schemes for your compact living room and transform it into a space you can invite your friends round to talk about how life is weird and reality doesn’t actually make sense.

What Paint Colors Make Living Rooms Look Larger?

The brain assumes that a room is bigger than it is if lighter colors are applied because lighter colours relect more light whereas darker colours absorb more light.

It makes sense.

If you’re walking through a forest, amongst the dense woodland, everything you see is dark and enclosed. Most of the available sunlight has been absorbed by the plants, not much reaches your eyes.

You carry on walking and come across a clearing where there are no trees, only grass that comes up to your knees.

What a sight it is.

The grass is bright green, you can see some blue and yellow flowers dotted about too. Even the trees on the clearing’s perimeter are beautiful.

The same amount of light is shining down on the clearing as it is on the woodland, but because there’s a lot less vegetation to absorb the rays, more are reaching your eyes.

You brain is assuming the same thing with your living room when it’s painted a light tone.

Your small room is now a glorious meadow.

Does White Make You Look Bigger?

As soon as I told you to that light colors help make a space seem larger, you thought of a white living room, didn’t you?

It makes sense.

White is as light as it gets.

You should proceed with caution, pure white can make any room in your home, not just a small living room, feel clinical and psychologically freezing.

There’s a risk of accidentally removing all emotion and personality from the room and I know you’re an interesting person – life and soul of the party.

You don’t want to ruin that.

A way to ensure that the environment of your living room remains upbeat and steers clear of a sterile atmosphere is to add accents of color.

These could be added as cushions or artwork.

Colors such as yellows, oranges and reds remind us of warmer climates. This warmth shifts over to us, where we feel it on our skin by association.

Bold colors with natural light

If you consider yourself an adventurous person, like me, then you’ll be drawn towards bolder colors no matter what anyone says.

There are a couple of ways you can utilize the effectiveness of saturated colors without overwhelming everything else in the room.

The first is to only paint with bolder colors if the living room is receiving a lot of natural light.

This means if it’s south-facing if you live in the Northern Hemisphere or north-facing if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.

The strong sunlight will ensure that the true hue will be represented as much as possible, artificial light in darker rooms often changes the color of the walls and will make them look unusual and potentially unpleasant.

If you be in a position to make structural alterations as well as the desire, you could think about increasing the size of windows or adding a skylight (if you have an accessible roof above the room) to your living room to gain those extra photons (light intensity) if you have a darker living room because it isn’t south/north facing.

All bold colors have lighter hues

Here’s an important note.

If you aren’t ready to go full-bold, each saturated color has a light, desaturated version with an addition of white.

You can tone down those yellows, reds, and blues until you find a hue that makes you feel comfortable.

This is actually an easier path to take to find the color that you want.

Start with an obvious color, one with a strong intensity, and you can begin to narrow down by adding white until finally reach your holy grail in small living room painting.

Find that hidden treasure and you can as good as hear your friends knocking on your door to hang out.

And that’s what life’s all about.

Having fun with good friends.