Tip Of The Week - Painted Archways

I hope everyone is enjoying this holiday season thus far! It has been snowing here most of the day and has really brought the Christmas season with it!

It is good to be back home after spending over a week and half in Colorado with my husband's family and now I need to get in gear and get some stuff around my house done.... both Christmas decorating and regular decorating!

My tip for this week is something that I thought of while I was in Colorado. My mother-in-law has redone a big chunk of her house these past few months and I noticed that she followed this one rule perfectly through out her house and I thought I would share it with everyone in case they didn't know this little tip.

How many of you have an archway or a door type opening like this picture?

I know it is common for people to come to these when they are painting and not know whether they should paint it or not if they are doing an accent color and both walls on each side of the doorway are different colors.

Here is the rule *Paint it the same color as the wall as the flow of traffic goes.

So basically, if you were to start at your front door and walk through the rooms, your archways should be painted the same color as the wall you are looking at.

I happen to have a DON'T example of my last house!

I wanted to paint the archway and my husband didn't like that idea, I let him win this argument because I was lucky that he was even letting me in the first place. It really bothers me that it isn't painted here.... after I painted this, I did officially find out that it is a design rule and I should have gone with my designer instinct and told my husband it was a rule.

Oh well, we weren't there long and I have made up for it in this house.

Here is my living room when I painted the base color. Notice I painted the archway the same color as the wall.

Then here it is stained.

What you don't see is that the back side of this wall is the burnt orange/red color. This just really helps with the flow of traffic and is much easier on the eye as the eye looks around.

If you notice on the very top picture, there are 2 archways. The first archway is white because that wall is white.... the back archway is the warm chocolaty color to flow with the back wall color.

Hopefully this is useful to others since we happened to make this mistake in our own house at one point.