How to Change Room Dimensions Using Color
You love your new house but the living room is on the small side and you want to give the illusion that the room is more spacious than it really is. There are techniques that you can use to visually enlarge a room, including the use of paint colors and dark to light color ratios. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Make a Small Room Appear Larger
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Keep in mind that cool colors, such as blues and green, recede, which make a room look bigger. Warm colors, such as red and orange, make a room appear smaller. Opt for a cool or pastel color or white paint when attempting to visually expand a room. Light colors reflect light and make a room appear more expansive than it actually is.
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Use a light color on your ceiling, perhaps even lighter than the wall color, to make thea ceiling appear higher. The room will appear larger as a result.
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Consider using light colored carpeting. A dark floor covering will make the room appear smaller.
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Mix pale colors with cool colors to enlarge a room. The less differentiation in colors (the walls versus the window frames, molding and baseboard) the bigger the room will seem. A chopped up room will feel and appear smaller.
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Widen a narrow room by using white or pale colors on the walls.
Make a Large Room Appear Smaller
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Use warm colors, reds orange, yellow, to make a large room appear quaint and cozy.
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Lower the ceiling (albeit not literally) by painting it a darker shade than the walls. If that still doesn’t do the trick, use the ceiling color and apply the paint to the top 12 inches or so of your walls and then add molding underneath. The molding breaks up space, which you want to do when you’re trying to make a room appear smaller. Bringing the darker ceiling color down the top of the wall will make the room look less vast. Think of the ceiling as a hat and the top of the walls, also painted in the ceiling color, as the brim of the hat.
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Use a dark colored carpet, which will make the room appear smaller.
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Shorten the length of a room by painting the farthest wall a darker color than the other walls.
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Tips & Warnings
Check out the resource section below, which will give you more tips on how to change the look of your room, including its size.
