Do you want your home to stand out in a beautifully harmonious way? Instead of posting a few trend colors here, I’d like to share some ideas as a basic roadmap about how to look at your home or other building when you decide to paint.

Important considerations are

• The overall and immediate neighborhood
• House style and architectural elements
• Roof shingles - are they visible, or not?
• Landscape (planting) and hardscape (stone, fencing, and other materials

Plan to physically test your new paint colors before painting. You can purchase testing/sample quarts at your paint store. Apply this paint to sturdy materials that are large enough to see from across the street--but easy to move around to different areas of your house--in different times of day and evening, and in proportion to the areas the colors will be used: Siding, trim, garage, accents.

Do NOT just paint swatches on the exterior or the interior of the building itself. If you do paint testing, be sure to apply it just as if on the actual building, on a primed surface with 2 coats of paint color.

When you get your large color sheets (8” x 10” or larger) from the paint manufacturer you can put them on a separate board, like foam core, and set them up outside to see the colors in different lighting.

Another option is to use a visualization program such as you can find as a service I call “DCP…” www.designercolorpalettes.com .