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What Colour Should You Paint Your Skirting Boards?

By: Luke Wildman Click author's name for more of his/her articles

You may not know this, but your skirting boards provide an important visual element to the room it is in. You may not think that not a lot of people notice the skirting boards in a room, but they actually do. These baseboards posses an attraction of their own and you need to exploit this attraction that they have in order to achieve the overall look that you are aiming for in that particular room.

Often, a dilemma that homeowners face when decorating a room is how to paint the skirting boards. What colour should they paint them? Should they paint them at all? If this is your personal dilemma, the answer to these questions depends really on the kind of look that you want to achieve in the room.

Painting a Uniform Colour for the Walls and the Skirting Boards

If your aim in a room is to create a kind of uniformity to the room, then you would do well to paint your baseboards the same colour as you would paint the walls. In this manner, you are doing a couple of things:

1. You cause the wall to connect visually directly to the floor without an interrupting element, which is what baseboards usually do.

2. You decrease the visual clutter that painting the baseboards a different colour from your wall would do. In doing so, you can achieve a peaceful and harmonious effect, and you could draw attention to the fine details on the walls, especially if the walls are made of fine-grade wood or if you have some artwork displayed on the walls.

Painting a uniform colour for both the walls and the skirting boards will also work beautifully if the colour you have chosen is something bright and happy. In this way, you are lending more impact to the colour itself and not just to the individual elements that make up the room.

If you are a minimalist, opting for just one colour for the baseboards and the walls lets you achieve the minimising effect that you want. Less can be more, and it is all good.

Painting a Contrasting Colour for the Skirting Boards

Uniformity may be a great thing, but sometimes, downplaying the elements of a room by choosing just one colour for the baseboards and the walls would do the room an injustice rather than heighten its beauty. This most especially applies if the baseboards have elaborate mouldings and the walls have carved details on it.

To bring out the beauty of such mouldings and carvings, it is only a must that they must be painted with a colour that contrasts with the walls. Perhaps stark white against a dark background would be dramatic. Or maybe light but complementary colours would work to create a more subtle effect. Whichever colour combination you choose, if you have elaborately carved mouldings on your baseboards, you should call attention to their beauty by painting them in contrast to the walls.

However you choose to paint your skirting boards, what you should remember is that the skirting boards should come in harmony with the rest of the decor in your room. Beauty comes with harmony, after all.