7 Tips for Choosing Paint Colors for Small Bathrooms

When painting your bathroom, you might immediately want to paint it your favorite color. When you take a bath and relax, you want to stare up into a comforting color, right?

But you might want to hold your horses and reconsider. If your favorite color is black, royal blue, or any other dark hue, those will really shrink the appearance of your bathroom. So when it’s already small, the paint color will make it look tiny.

Why? Because dark colors absorb light instead of reflecting it. When light gets sucked into a surface instead of bouncing around, this gives your eyes the illusion of a much smaller space.

If you already have very little room to work with, then painting your bathroom a dark shade will only make you feel like Alice in Wonderland. You can go for dark colors if you want to make a bold statement with your bathroom though. Add plenty of mirrors to decrease how claustrophobic it feels.

On that note, you should go for bright colors instead. These will look nice and cheerful whenever you walk into the bathroom. For instance, if you go for a pastel blue or green, it can constantly remind you of Easter and spring, even when it’s in the dead of winter.

The only color that won’t absorb any light is white. So even if you get pastel blue, it’ll absorb a bit of light. However, it should be pretty negligible when compared to white. However, it’ll literally look like night and day between light and dark shades.

Now, we’re not saying that you need to keep everything just one color. That would probably look a little boring and way too uniform.

But don’t go crazy with a bunch of different shades. This can look chaotic and disorganized, which will be dizzying in a small confined space.

This is especially true if you try to mix dark with light shades. As you can guess, the dark colors will completely overpower the light ones, which will draw people’s focus to the dark areas immediately. In addition, it’ll absorb more light, which can, again, make your space seem a lot smaller than it really is.

This hue pairs well with hunter green, teal, white, shades of gray, burnt red, pale blues, and light to medium wood.

You might think that choosing white is completely boring, but that’s where you’re wrong!

There are actually so many different white shades out there that it’d take you forever to get through them all. In general, you have pure, warm, and cool whites.

Pure white is best used in bathrooms that have a modern style, as it gives off that futuristic, sterile look. For warm whites, you’ll want to use it to match shades of either red or yellow. And if you have a room with blue hues, then it’s best if you complement it with cool whites.

When you actually see how many shades of white you can get, you’ll be surprised at just how nuanced it can be. This will enable you to choose the perfect shade for your small bathroom.

Want to make things interesting? Then try out some simple patterns. For example, you can pick either dots or diamonds.

However, because you have a small space, you want the patterns to not only be small but also light in color as well. If they’re big and dark-colored, these patterns can end up swallowing the entire wall panel, which can make you feel cramped.

Many people paint all their walls and then completely forget about their ceilings. Of course, if you’re painting your walls white, then this won’t matter too much.

But if you have other shades on your walls, mismatched paint for your ceiling will make it seem lower than it really is. This is especially true if it’s painted a dark hue.

What you want to do is extend the base paint (and any patterns) up to your ceiling. This will create an optical illusion of a taller bathroom. This is because your eye can’t really tell where the walls stop and where the ceiling begins.

If you always feel like your cramped vertically in your bathroom, here’s another trick that can give it a more stretched-out feeling.

If you paint vertical stripes, it’ll naturally draw your eyes up and down instead of left and right. But this will only work if you use shades that are very closely matched in color. If they’re contrasting too much, it can be much too dramatic for your bathroom (unless that’s what you’re trying to achieve).

With the right paint colors for small bathrooms, you can make sure you don’t end up painting it a shade that’ll make it seem even smaller and more claustrophobic.

Of course, you can always get a professional like San Diego Painting Company to help. Not only can we advise you on the best paint colors for your bathroom, but we can also paint it expertly so it looks beautiful and crisp.

If you’re ready for a change of scenery inside your home, the professionals at The Painting Company San Diego are here to help.

Schedule your free estimate today!