Planning your spring decorating project
A new season provides the ideal opportunity to refresh and update your interiors. Introducing a new colour scheme or wallpaper can instantly transform the feeling of a space. Whether it’s making your bedroom feel cosier and more inviting, or creating a hallway scheme that will welcome you home each day, a spring decorating project is a simple way to elevate your space.
Read our six steps for planning a project that will add beauty and personality to your home. Discover our tips for choosing the perfect paint colour or wallpaper, plus guidance on ordering sample pots and selecting the right paint finish…
1. Decide which part of your home you want to transform
The first step in any decorating project is deciding which room you will transform. It could be that you’re only looking for a simple refresh, such as choosing a new shade for your bathroom walls, or upcycling a piece of furniture to add a pop of colour to your bedroom.
A larger project, like designing an open-plan living space, offers a wonderful chance to create a sophisticated colour scheme using more than one shade. You can also incorporate a wallpaper like our lively and imaginative ‘Animal Kingdom – Atomic’, perfect for a family breakfast room. Consider how your chosen shades will flow throughout different rooms, and how you can use colour and wallpaper to define different zones within one space.
Browse schemes by roomPaint any surface with Intelligent Paints
At Little Greene, we offer a complete range of paint finishes, so you can bring mood-boosting colour to every room and surface in your home. Explore durable, washable Intelligent Paints for bathrooms, kitchens and hallways, with groundbreaking Intelligent Grip™ technology that means you can prime and paint walls, woodwork, radiators, uPVC windows, cabinetry and more with a single tin. These water-based, child-safe, low odour formulations are safe use in nurseries and playrooms too.
2. Think about your vision for your space
The colours and patterns you surround yourself with can have a big impact on the look and feel of your home. Before you start designing your scheme, it’s always important to consider what you want to achieve. This means thinking about the function of the room you are decorating, as well as the atmosphere you want to create.
If you want to refresh a family space where spend lots of time, think about colours you will feel comfortable with. You might want to create a sense of calm with soft neutrals, or reflect nature with soothing greens and botanical wallpapers like Capricorn - Boringdon. Murals like this one offer a fantastic way to achieve instant transformation, creating a space that really invites you inside.
Read about choosing colours
3. Order a colourcard and create your scheme
Browsing our colourcards is the perfect way to select colours for your project. They present our complete palette of 196 colours on individually painted chips, made with real paint in Absolute Matt Emulsion. You’ll also receive our ‘Sweet Treats’ colourcard, featuring nine tempting warm neutrals inspired by delicious desserts.
Using the ‘flying chips’, you can compare shades against other elements, such as fabrics, existing furniture or wallpapers. Our ‘Colour Scales’ card provides a simple way to choose complementary paint shades. Each column presents related shades based on the same pigment. Combine these hues with confidence to bring characterful depth of colour to your scheme. To transform your home with wallpaper, browse our wallpapers by colour, collection, period and style.
Order your colourcards
4. Explore ideas, inspiration and guidance
If you’re finding it hard to curate your scheme, there are plenty of resources to help and inspire you. Our inspiration gallery shows schemes featuring every paint colour and wallpaper in our palette. You can search schemes by room or by colour to gain ideas for your project and visualise how your chosen shade or wallpaper will look within a room. For more inspiration, follow @littlegreenepaintcompany on Instagram to discover the latest schemes featuring Little Greene in real homes.
Explore our Inspiration Gallery
Our Advice Hub is brimming with advice and ideas to help you plan your project. Read how to select colours based on the orientation of your room, or learn about different styles of decorating such as ‘Colour Drenching’ and ‘Double Drenching’. For bespoke guidance, we also offer a Colour Consultancy Service, with options for in-store appointments or from the comfort of your own home.
5. Request sample pots and wallpaper samples to test in situ
We always recommend ordering samples of your chosen colours and wallpaper to test in the room you are decorating. There are many site-specific factors that could affect the way different colours will appear in your home. So it’s very important to sample in situ first, to make sure you’re happy with your scheme.
Paint out large swatches of each colour and view them in the room at different times of day so you can see the effect of varying light. If you’ve chosen more than one colour, view each shade individually and side-by-side to ensure they complement each other perfectly and will create a harmonious scheme.
Order sample pots
6. Choose your paint finish and begin your project!
The paint finish you choose depends on the room you are decorating and the surface you are painting. For walls, we recommend Absolute Matt Emulsion for low-traffic spaces like bedrooms or studies. Or choose Intelligent Matt Emulsion as a washable alternative for kitchens, hallways and child’s bedrooms. Explore our range of interior paint finishes for walls, woodwork, metalwork and more, or read our guide to choosing the right paint finish.
Our product pages include a helpful paint calculator to give an estimate of the quantity of paint you will need for your space. And if you need guidance to complete your project, our Advice Hub includes lots of helpful pages on topics such as painting a wall or wallpapering your space.
Choose your paint finish
