Five ways to add colour to your family home

Here are five ways to add colour to your family home…this is a sponsored post in association with Crown Paint’s Breatheasy range

How do you add colour to your family home? As someone who used to mainly wear black and wanted a minimalist, monochrome bedroom, I’m now a total colour convert. I love having colour around our house. It brightens everything up, and makes for a much happier home.

To add even more colour, we’ve been working on a project with Crown Paint’s Breatheasy range of paints. We painted doors and Florence’s bedroom with paints from the Crown Breatheasy matt and silk emulsion range, which are now certified as asthma and allergy-friendly. This paint is a great option for family homes, as it has low VOC, is 99% solvent-free and as a result has no horrible fumes.

If you want to brighten things up a bit, here are five ways to add colour to your family home with paint:

Keep it neutral but add colourful highlights: You might want to go for bold blocks of colour throughout your house, but if you don’t, an option is to keep a neutral base then add colour in lots of other ways. For example, we have greige-y carpet or wooden floors throughout the house, and then white or grey walls, with colour added elsewhere, from art work through to painted doors.

Paint sections, or patterns: You don’t have to paint entire walls – unless you want to – and there are ideas over on my Pinterest board for adding patterns, lines and sections to walls with paint.

When it came to painting Florence’s room, in one half of the room by her bed there’s a strip that goes half-way round the wall. It’s one of those strange things that always seem to be in renovation houses – like our bathroom cupboard built on top of a cupboard, and the dreaded red fireplace – those random things that you have no idea why they are there or what they are for. I’d contemplated taking the strip off but was worried it would damage the plaster and we’d end up with a bumpy wall.

Instead, we decided to work with it and paint under the section instead. It’s a smaller space but has made a huge difference.

Go for bold: There is a big selection of colours in the Crown Paint’s Breatheasy range, with lots of neutrals, but we wanted bold, bright colours for the doors to match our painted doors on the same floor of the house.

We picked Happy Daze (a bold yellow) and Duck Egg (blue)

Let the children pick their own paint colours: This may sound ever-so-slightly terrifying. But trust me (and them). Last year we let E and F pick the colour of their new colourful doors, and they loved the responsibility and still talk about it now.

So this time we also let F pick the colour for her room. She wanted purple, so we went with Lavender Cupcake from the Crown Breatheasy range.

Pick family-friendly paint: One of the great things about the Breatheasy range is not having to worry about paint fumes, and it’s also ideal if your children have allergies or asthma. As the area where we were painting in Florence’s room was by her bed, using the Breatheasy paint meant she could sleep there again once it had dried so there was minimal disruption.

The finished products:

I really love the Crown Paint Breatheasy colours, and think they all worked perfectly. The paint is bold and bright, and it’s an added bonus that they are asthma and alergy-friendly. But most importantly, adding these colours make me smile when I see them.

This post is sponsored content in association with Crown Paint and Mumsnet…more posts, our washi tape cloud shelves and how to make DIY wall stickers