The One Color Paint That's Making Your Living Room Look Outdated

When it comes to choosing paint colors for your home, what you pick can have a huge impact on how your home feels. They can make a small room feel more spacious, or a large room feel cozy. Color can even make a room more soothing or more energetic. Of course, some colors have fewer positive effects. If your living room is painted a cool gray, you might be starting to feel like it's lost its luster. While cool gray still has its uses elsewhere, such as in a nice stone tile bathroom, it can make your living room look outdated.

Many designers are moving away from cool gray and similarly cold colors in favor of warmer and more dynamic color palettes. This is particularly true of parts of your home that you want to feel open and inviting. Since your living room is a place you and your guests will likely be spending more time in than elsewhere in the house, it makes sense to give it a comfortable and welcoming style, and gray just doesn't fit. Colors like warm brown, teal, mossy green, and dusty shades of pink and purple are better options for living rooms.

This is in large part due to the way gray is perceived. While gray does have some positive attributes, it's also associated with impersonal or distant feelings. This makes it much better suited to a waiting room than your living room! The professional, impersonal feeling of gray was trendy for a while, but now it feels cold and clinical to many homeowners. Accordingly, trends have moved in the opposite direction, towards more colorful and expressive color schemes.

One of the most straightforward ways to update your living room is to paint it an entirely different color. It takes time, especially if you have a lot of furniture or decor that needs to be moved, but it's an efficient way to cover your gray walls. However, that won't work for everyone. If you're renting your home, painting the walls is usually not allowed. You may also want to look at other options if you either don't have the time to repaint or if you mostly still like the shade of gray you have. If you can't paint the walls, consider using peel-and-stick wallpaper to cover the gray paint. It's typically renter-friendly, and it comes in a wide range of colors and patterns.

If you don't want to cover the walls entirely, there are other ways to shake things up. Consider creating an accent wall with either paint or wallpaper (or another material, if you're feeling crafty) to add something extra for the gray to play off of. An accent wall breaks up the smooth, flat gray, drawing your eye away from it and making the room feel more interesting. You can also create two-tone walls by changing either the top or bottom half of the wall. This can balance out your gray walls and make your room more dynamic. For an extra layer of intrigue, add some decorative trim such as a chair rail at the place where the two colors meet. You can add decorative trim on a budget using Joanna Gaines's trick, or go all out with a more premium, custom option. You can even use wainscoting, a type of decorative paneling that covers the bottom third to half of a wall, in place of paint or wallpaper.