paint the living room
It’s easy with these tips
© Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock
Do you need new momentum in your apartment, but don’t want to turn everything upside down right away? How about a new wall color? We’ll now tell you how you can paint your living room without having to complete a painter’s course.
You love your apartment, your furniture and decorative treasures? But somehow you feel like a change? No problem. With a little preparation and a few supplies, you can give your home a little upgrade. How? You could just paint your living room.
It doesn’t matter whether you decide on a new colour, classic, clean white or a refreshment of the previous shade – with a few brush strokes your home will shine in a new splendor in no time.
Painting the living room: You need these utensils
If you want to paint your living room, you don’t need any equipment like a pro. You’ve 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
- Paint brush for edges and corners
- Paint roller with scraper grid
- foil or painter fleece for the ground
- Duct tape / masking tape
- if necessary, film to cover furniture
- if necessary, an old whisk / wooden stick to stir the paint
The preparations
As so often in life, painting the living room requires good preparation. Then the painting itself is not only fast, but also does not cause any major difficulties.
First of all, of course, you make sure that your furniture, your floor and your decoration are not damaged. Clean out your living room as best you can before painting and get as much out of the room as possible. So you don’t just bring yours Treasures safebut also make sure that you paint the living room later enough space have to work.
Everything that has to remain in the room should then be well covered with foil or a tarpaulin. If necessary, you can also tape the foil with masking tape so that it does not accidentally slip. Also the You should cover a large area of the floor. If you’re experienced and choose a fairly solid wall color (so you don’t get everything splattered all over the room), you can just line a wide strip of foil along the wall.
Otherwise, we recommend that you rather cover the entire floor before you start painting the living room. Good side effect: If you lay out the whole living room, you can also move carefree through the room – without fear of having paint under the soles, which you may then spread throughout the room.
Once you have protected your furniture and floor, it is best to take a look at the light switches, sockets, etc. These can often be easily unscrewed, which makes painting later easier and cleaner. Important: Remember to turn off the power before plugging into outlets, etc. work
You should pay attention to this when painting the living room
Everything backed up? Is everything taped or covered? Excellent! Then it can actually start. Grab your brush, roller and Color and give your living room a new look by painting it.
If you are unsure whether you can achieve the result you want, the following tips may help you:
- Even if it is the annoying part of the whole project – do not do without thorough masking of edges and the ceiling. The neater and more precise you work here, the easier and cleaner the painting will be.
- Ideally, yours need walls no prep work. However, you should still undergo a check: Will the wallpaper still hold? Are there cracks in the walls? Do spots need to be repaired first?
- Make sure the roller (or brush) has a good amount of paint. The roller should be well soaked, but not have absorbed too much paint.
- It’s best to start with the corners and edgesby doing this paint with a brush. This ensures clean edges and you make sure that you also get the small angles.
- If you paint the larger areas with a paint roller, be careful, if possible draw even tracks from top to bottom and not to work backwards and forwards. This will prevent you from distributing the color unevenly and with varying degrees of opulence.
- Depending on how the wall color is now (lighter or darker than the new color), you may need to paint your living room more than once. It also depends on the opacity of the paint.
- If necessary, get good advice at the hardware store when it comes to choosing your color. do you want to white, rely on a slightly more expensive product. In this way you can save yourself color or shadows that shimmer through without having to paint a second time.
- Before you tackle 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 missing a small flaw in your work afterwards. With the paint on the masking tape that has bonded with the paint on the wall, you could then tear off the paint on the wall as well. Unfortunately, your effort to get clean edges would have been in vain.
What color goes in the living room?
If you want to paint the walls in your living room in color, you can choose from the entire color spectrum according to your taste. The only important thing to consider when choosing a color is the size of the room. Smaller rooms tend to be made even smaller by overly dark tones. If you still want to use a strong tone, you could, for example, only paint one wall and the rest of the walls in white. Since the selection is really huge, we would like to recommend a few particularly beautiful colors or color families.
We recommend these tones if you want to paint your living room:
- muted colors such as grey, creamy white, grey-green or grey-blue, taupe
- Pastel shades such as rose, reed green, mint green, lemon
- bold 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 customize your walls with different techniques, patterns or accents. We have put together a few nice examples for you.
A few final tips
- paint amount: Before you buy paint, calculate your consumption as precisely as possible. Think about whether you need to paint once or twice, and also plan for small touch-ups. Of course, you don’t want to have buckets of paint left over, but you don’t want to run out of paint while you’re painting either.
- Sustainability: Wash your brushes and rollers thoroughly after use. Then you can use them a second or third time if you want to redesign or freshen up other rooms.
- Precision: Do you value precision and exact color edges? Then tape the edges with masking tape, paint a light coat of white paint 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 masking tape and the wall – and “blocks”. This way the bright paint has no chance of running underneath.
Did you get a taste for painting the living room and want to start a new project in your apartment? Then we have more great tips if you want to set up your study or design your rooms in a boho style.