If you’ve always got the blues, you might have the wrong paint for your north-facing room. See, I learned all about paint while avoiding a kitchen remodel. It was the classic home renovation pick and roll; renovate the bedrooms instead of tackling the non-operational kitchen. I mean, why start on a truly urgent project when you can tailspin for months over paint colors for north-facing rooms?

I’ll show you pics of the fabulous coral and true teal we decided, on as well as giving specific color suggestions below, but if all you want are bullet points without the backstory, the key takeaways when painting a north-facing room include:

  • Stark white paint is no good in north-facing rooms. More on why below
  • Warm neutrals (and whites with warm undertones) are a solid substitute for bright/stark white
  • Dramatic dark colors give a north-facing room depth
  • Pastels with warm undertones work well
  • Pastels with cool undertones can look tragic
  • Room decor, flooring, and exterior foliage impact the undertones in your paint selection. I linked resources below for understanding undertones

Backstory:

A few years ago, our electric oven broke (bear with me, this does circle back to paint). The easy fix would be replacing the oven, but my wife really wanted a gas range—and that meant hiring a plumber. Besides that, our janky white shaker cabinet doors were constantly falling off and the footprint of the galley kitchen was tooooo small for two cooks; so if we were going to do one thing, we were going to do it all.

photo of a galley kitchen with white shaker cabinets
The wee kitchen galley with disobedient cabinet doors and non-functional oven.


My wife and I were terrified of taking on a kitchen remodel (rightly so, it turns out the process has been
fraught with drama). So over two years of remodel denial we became experts at the no-stove workaround. My wife should write a lifestyle cookbook for the Instapot, crockpot, and countertop toaster oven crowd. After TWO YEARS of no-stove crock pot cooking we said, this is ridiculous! We are grown women! We can face our fears…and we promptly agreed to repaint the bedrooms.

Renovating the bedrooms

As any novice home renovator soon finds out, just repainting the rooms does not suffice. The carpets were disgusting from years of doggies, the original 1950s baseboards were jank, and the original closet was a dysfunctional monster. So, instead of a quick paint touch-up, we embarked on a two-month bedroom overhaul. Classic avoidance technique (do you see how we artfully pushed aside the kitchen work?). 

Choosing the paint

I thought the pale, icy blue of the guest and main bedrooms always felt cold and shadowy. Even when the sun was shining I’d wrap up in a depression sweater when I was back there.

A pale blue wall with old and damaged baseboards
Sad blue paint and sad 1950s baseboards

What I didn’t know then is that north facing rooms have minimal direct sunlight, so colors with cool undertones make cold shadows. So although the blue was, in theory, a beautiful pastel, in our north-facing rooms the color looked drab and cold.

We tend toward modern design and reasoned brighter and whiter might be a good choice. Boy was I wrong. After deep diving into blogs and paint sites, I learned that the type of sun exposure the rooms get impacts how the paint colors look on the walls. So instead of fabulously airy and light, true white looks grey and dingy in cool light, delivery dreary institutional vibes.

Counter to my ideas, light theory was teaching me that bold, rich colors bring warmth and life to dark rooms. In our shadowy room, deep colors could create a sense of coziness as opposed to the depression sweater vibe of our current pale blue.

View through a bedroom window to a small patio and back hill
We have large windows on the north wall of both bedrooms, but the windows look up a wooded hillside and never receive direct sunlight.
Empowered by countless home remodel blogs, I embarked on a campaign to paint our main bedroom a warm, glowing deep teal and our guest room/office a fabulous coral. Here is my teal paint Pinterest inspiration board and my coral wall paint Pinterest inspiration board.

A few years back when we painted the living room and dining room, we learned (the hard way) that paint color cards DO NOT LOOK ANYTHING LIKE what ends up on your wall. This is because the orientation of your room, your interior lighting, your decor, carpet color, and the amount of natural sunlight you receive all impact how the color looks. 

woman making a silly face in front of multiple paint swatches painted on a wall
Lessons learned from the living room. Don’t lose your mind amongst all those lilacs that had masqueraded as grey at the paint store.
As a result of painting millions of misleading sample grays on our living room walls back then, we had a better strategy for painting our bedrooms this time. Try it out if you like:

  1. Search Pinterest for paint inspo for North-facing rooms! Make a Pinterest board with colors you like
  2. Consider your decor (bed frame, carpet/flooring, artwork and overheard lighting) and what colors would look good?
  3. Bring your Pinterest boards to your paint shop and have them help you color match some of the paint cards to the pics
  4. Buy no more than four paint samples to test on the walls
  5. Paint large (at least 2 or three foot squares) swatches of each color on the main walls

I wish I had better photos of our teal paint samples, but thanks to the crap natural lighting in our main bedroom, photographing this room is like trying to bathe a cat. Never a good time with natural light and overhead light casts strange shadows. Here is my best attempt:

teal paint swatches on a light-colored wall
From the top, clockwise: Real Teal, Seaworthy, Oceanside, Great Falls. All by Sherwin Williams
The coral guest room photographs far better thanks to an overhead skylight that augments the natural light in the room.

coral colored paint swatches painted on a light blue wall. Grey carpet samples against a brown carpet.
From left to right: Ravishing Coral and Lei Flower by Sherwin Williams. In addition to my photog skills, this pic shows off our grody old carpet, the new carpet options (spoiler, we went w/ the darker one) and those beat down baseboards, which are now replaced.
Our final paint choices

Curious how the rooms turned out? We chose Lei Flower for the guest room / office and Real Teal for our bedroom. I LOVE the coral paint and I adore the teal BUT I flubbed on the teal by choosing a semi-gloss sheen. In retrospect I would have done a satin sheen in the teal like I did with the coral. The semi-gloss is just too damn shiny. Here are the final pics:

Resources: Paint for north-facing rooms

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