Need a change?
With these tips you can bring new momentum to your home
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Do you need new momentum in your apartment, but don't want to turn everything upside down? How about a new wall color? We'll tell you now how you can paint your living room without having to complete an apprenticeship as a painter.
Do you love your apartment, your furniture and decorative treasures? But somehow do you feel like a change? No problem. With a little preparation and a few utensils, you can give your home a small upgrade. How? You could just paint your living room.
Regardless of whether you opt for a new color, classic, clean white or a refresh of the previous color – with a few brushstrokes your home will shine in a new shine in no time.
Painting living room: You need these utensils
If you want to paint your living room, you don't need equipment like a pro. You have probably accumulated a lot at home over the years anyway. So that you can quickly check what you already have in the basement or in the storage room and what you still need to get, we have a small checklist compiled for you:
- Wall paint your choice
- brush for edges and corners
- Paint roller with wiping grid
- Slide or Painter's fleece for the ground
- Duct tape / Masking tape
- if necessary, foil for covering furniture
- if necessary, an old whisk / wooden stick to stir the paint
The preparations
As is so often the case in life, painting the living room requires good preparation. Then the painting itself is not only quick, but also does not cause any major difficulties.
First of all, of course, you make sure that your furniture, your floor and your decorations are not damaged. Before painting, clear out your living room as much as possible and get as much out of the room as possible. So you don't just bring yours Treasures in safety, but also make sure that you paint the living room later enough space have to work.
Everything that needs to be left in the room should then be well covered with foil or tarpaulin. If necessary, you can also glue the film with masking tape so that it does not slip accidentally. Also the You should cover a large area of the floor. If you are practiced and choose a solid wall color (so that everything will not splash all over the room), you can also just cover a wide strip along the wall with foil.
Otherwise, we recommend that you cover the entire floor before you start painting the living room. Good side effect: If you cover the whole living room, you can move around the room without worrying – without fear of having paint under the soles, which you can then distribute throughout the room.
If you have protected your furniture and your floor, it is best to take a look at light switches, sockets and the like. Often these can be easily unscrewed, which makes painting easier and cleaner later. Important: Make sure to turn off the power before plugging in electrical outlets, etc. working.
You should pay attention to this in the living room
Is everything secured? Everything masked or covered? Excellent! Then it can actually start. Grab brushes, rollers and colour and give your living room a new look by painting.
If you are unsure whether you can achieve the result you want, the following tips may help you:
- Even if it's the annoying part of the overall project – Do not do without the thorough masking of edges and the ceiling. The tidier and more precisely you work here, the easier and cleaner it will be to paint.
- Ideally, your walls no preparatory work. However, you should still subject to a check: Will the wallpaper still hold up? Are there cracks in the walls? Do areas have to be repaired first?
- Make sure the roller (or brush) has a good amount of paint. The roll should be well soaked, but not have absorbed too much paint.
- It's best to start with the Corners and edgesby doing this with a brush. This ensures clean edges and you make sure that you also catch the small angles.
- If you are painting the larger areas with a paint roller, be careful, if possible to draw even tracks from top to bottom and not working all over the place. This prevents you from distributing the color unevenly and in different amounts.
- Depending on how the wall color looks to date (lighter or darker than the new color), you will have to paint your living room more than once. That also depends on the opacity of the color.
- If necessary, seek good advice from the hardware store when it comes to choosing your color. Do you want to white, bet on a slightly more expensive product. This way you can save yourself shimmering paint or shadows without having to paint a second time.
- Before starting a second coat of paint, let the paint dry well.
- We recommend removing adhesive strips on edges and the like as soon as possible. If you wait too long and the paint has dried in the meantime, you run the risk of giving your work a little flaw afterwards. With the paint on the masking tape that has combined with the paint on the wall, you could then possibly tear off the paint on the wall with it. Your effort to get clean edges would unfortunately have been in vain.
Which color suits the living room?
If you want to paint the walls in your living room in color, you can choose from the entire color spectrum to suit your taste. When choosing a color, it would only be important to pay attention to the size of the room. Smaller rooms tend to be made even smaller if they are too dark. If you still want to use a strong tone, you could, for example, only design one wall in color and the remaining walls in white. Since the selection is really huge, we would like to recommend a few particularly beautiful colors or color families to you.
We recommend these tones if you want to paint your living room:
- muted colors such as gray, creamy white, gray-green or gray-blue, taupe
- Pastel shades such as rose, reed green, mint green, lemon
- strong colors such as moss green, berry, anthracite, fir green, nougat, petrol
Color techniques, accents, patterns – you have these design options
Painting a living room can simply bring a fresh color to the wall. But it can also become a creative project. You can use different techniques, patterns or accents to design your walls individually. We have put together a few nice examples for you.
A few more tips to finish off
- Amount of paint: Before buying paint, calculate your consumption as precisely as possible. Think about whether you have to paint once or twice and also plan small repair work. Of course, you don't want to have buckets of paint left over – but you shouldn't run out of wall paint while painting.
- Sustainability: Wash your brushes and rollers thoroughly after using them. Then you can use it a second or third time if you want to redesign or freshen up other rooms.
- Precision: Do you attach great importance to precision and exact color edges? Then mask the edges with masking tape, lightly paint the masking tape once over the masking tape within the later colored area and let the paint dry well. This ensures that the white paint runs under any gaps between the masking tape and the wall – and "clogs". This means that the bright color has no chance of running underneath it later.
Have you got the taste for painting the living room and want to start a new project in your apartment? Then we have other great tips if you want to set up your study or design your rooms in a boho style.