Repainting some of the rooms in your home in winter can certainly help spruce up your mood as well as your living environment.  If you struggle with a starting point to pick your new colors, here are a few suggestions that may help.

• Start with something in your home that inspires you such as a painting or a piece of art.  Are there colors in it that you would love to incorporate into your home?
• Look at your home accessories … sometimes the colors in a decorative pillow or an area rug jump out at you and scream “These colors belong on your walls!”
• Go to a quilt shop and take in the vast array of colors in all those bolts of quilting fabric.  As you gaze across the shop, you might just feel a positive reaction or connection to one or more of the color groupings.
• Pick up a current issue of a home decorating magazine.  Flip through it and you’ll see a myriad of color ideas.
• Visit the model homes of home builders in your area.  These showplaces are professionally decorated and reflect current color trends in interior and exterior design.
• Go to a furniture store and look at the fabrics on the upholstered furniture.  If your eye is drawn to a particular piece, check it out closely and see what color combination the fabric contains.
• Check out the websites of major paint manufacturers such as Benjamin Moore (www.benjaminmoore.com)  and Sherwin Williams (www.sherwin-williams.com).  Paint is their business and their websites are chock full of all kinds of tools to help you select paint colors as well as show you their own line of colors.

In general, pay attention to color as you go along through life.  You will encounter colors and color combinations that are very pleasing to you, and you will come across colors that define the word “yuck”.  Think about how the pleasing colors would look incorporated into your home … and now you have a starting point!