Painting the Garage Black: Finding Our Color Confidence

We’re not going to lie to you: there have been a few times in our colorful career where we’ve gotten halfway through painting a room only to give each other that “oh no” look. The look that says “did we just make a huge mistake by picking this color we thought we’d love? And now there’s so much of it? Oh my gosh what are we doing?”

But every time that has happened we’ve referred back to our original vision, considered all of the other things that will take up space on a wall and in the room—from art to furniture to mirrors—and persisted confidently knowing that sometimes creating a space that is a real stunner can be, at times, really scary.

We haven’t always been that confident though, and it’s taken years of making bold color choices and experiencing doubt along the way to finally get to where we’re at now. There was in fact a day in our lives where we had not yet put a bold color on a wall, and not yet let our vision fully manifest itself through pops of blush and sage and marigold. It took two things for us to gain that confidence: planning & risk assessment.

You can’t 100% account for whether or not you’ll love a color once it’s filled the walls of a room, but planning can go a long way toward helping you have a fuller vision of what that room will look like. We touch on this in our book Housewarming, but creating a mood board or mockup that uses the color(s) you’re considering set against imagery of all the other items that you’re planning for the room is our go-to method for confidently using colors that may otherwise be a little daunting. Paint is just one element of a room, and while it’s an extremely important one it does need to be considered a single element of a complex system of aesthetics making up the whole room. Filling in the other elements before you start with the brushstrokes (via a digital mockup made in photo editing software) is our number one tip for gaining color confidence.

Risk assessment comes into the picture when you’ve chosen a color you love but you aren’t sure you’re going to like seeing it every day, or maybe you think you’d like it as an accent color but maybe not a full room of walls. We have a rule that if we can “fix it” in one day, it’s worth the risk. As in, if we paint a room a deep shade of purple and then realize it wasn’t the best move, does the room’s size and shape accommodate us repainting it all in one day? If so, let’s go for it! This may be smaller spaces like a laundry room, walk-in closet, or more modest bedroom. On the other hand, if we’re truly nervous about a paint color even after all of our planning and it would take more than a day to repaint, we’ll often explore other ways to use that color in a less committal way, such as painting just the door that color, or using it as an accent color.

For our most recent painting project, we gave our drab garage a modern update with a coat of Sherwin-Williams Emerald® Exterior in the color Tricorn Black SW 6258 in a satin finish. Our vision for the entire property is a somewhat eclectic mix of modern mountain home and European farmhouse, and this color really felt like the perfect fit. Even though we have a lot experience with bold color choices, it was still kinda sorta terrifying to commit to painting the entire exterior of a building on our property a dark, rich black color. Black is way out of our wheelhouse as the folks who’ve designed countless pink rooms, so it almost felt like we needed to relearn that confidence all over again. We mocked up the garage in our photo editing software, digitally changing out the lights and adding extra foliage near the facade, and fell in love. To make sure we felt 100% confident in our color choice, we ordered a few of Sherwin-Williams peel & stick samples from swsamples.com. We wanted to make sure the color looked as good as we expected on the physical building. The peel & stick samples are really cool because you can test several options and then just peel them off—meaning that if there are a few days or weeks between doing your color tests and actually painting, you don’t have to have big test splotches on your wall during that time.

We loved how the Tricorn Black peel & stick sample looked, and seeing it next to less saturated black and gray options further encouraged us… we wanted it to be dark and sleek! Painting it this rich black color has made us love driving past it every day as we enter and exit the property.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today and checking out our latest project! We hope you’re feeling a little inspired and a little more color confident!