How a White Palette Makes it Easier to Add Color to Your Home

Learning how to Add color to your home is so much easier with a neutral color palette. I can’t wait to share how I “neutralized” our home so I could add in More color.

Before I started transforming the decor in my home to a farmhouse style, I had a lot of color in my house. My living room was tan with highlights of aqua and my family room was gray, dark red, and green. Our master bedroom was themed in yellow with orange highlights. Oh heavens, now that I am writing this I realize how awful it sounds! What was I thinking? Today I am going to share what you need to do to your home before you add color.

Having lots of color in your home looks nice (ok, maybe not always) but it really makes it difficult to decorate for the seasons and holidays. Trust me, I tried and it was really hard.

So what’s the secret?

You need to neutralize your home first.  Huh?

If you can make some changes and use more neutral colors,  then it will be a lot easier to add color to your home.

Let me show you what I mean. 

Here are a few photos of my former (aka BEFORE) attempts to decorate with color. Notice my “Christmas” decorations with the aqua and green holiday balls? My holiday Christmas wrapping paper was all in turquoise and white. It was a pretty holiday theme except it just didn’t look and feel like Christmas.

Having a neutral palette in your home is more calming and easy to work with. Once I realized this, I had the couches in our living room slipcovered in off-white. The chairs were also slipcovered and sent up to the master bedroom. The drapes came down (the sun had ruined them) as did some of the artwork.

Now don’t panic. Our living room is neutral but I never intended for it to always be neutral. 

You have already seen how our master bedroom is gray and white. 

And it used to look like this. I know you are laughing about now. I know I am.

Our dining room looks like this. It’s neutral but has a very fun color on the walls.

And it used to look like this. 

With a neutral palette, it is so easy to change pillow covers and add fresh flowers and accessories to add a seasonal theme to a room. When I decorate our home for the holidays, it is so much easier than I imagined! You don’t have to take things away when your room is decorated in neutral colors.  Instead, all you have to do is add color.

How to Add Color to Your Home

The Dining Room

You just saw a neutral photo of our dining room. Look how I transformed it for Christmas.

And here it is for fall.

This is what it looked like in the spring.

The Master Bedroom

Our master bedroom had a wonderful holiday feel with minimal decor but fun pops of color.

The Living Room

Adding a little bit of color to our living room can make a huge difference.

 

I seem to love adding orange/coral/peach to our living room. This was for spring.

The Family Room

Our family room has a very limited palette. I love the comfy, chippy, and comfortable look.

This is how I just styled it for fall this year. Even a bit of color makes a huge difference.

 

Here is my family room decked out for the holidays. I absolutely love this!

I added a little spring decor last Easter to warm up the room.

I hope these photos show how simple it was to add color to our neutral decor. First I neutralized some of the rooms in our home. Then I just added some colorful accents.

I should address how I keep my white furniture looking clean. All of my couches have slipcovers so they can be washed or dry cleaned. Here is a blog post I wrote about how to wash your slipcovers. Also, in our family room, our couches are typically covered with white vintage quilts. We (and our dog Sport) spend a lot of time in our family room and this helps keep the slipcovers clean. It helps so much.

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