still not decided,asking questions again, please humor me [smile]

[festiveface]

trying to redoecorate the living room. it's a big room and the walls are divided into 3 sections by 2 dado rails.

so far i have considered:

lining paper and paint with light colour everywhere but chimney breast which would be a shade darker.

painting various shades of same colour starting darker in the bottom section and going lighter.

darker around middle and magnolia or something top and bottom

and now today, seeing a creamy striped paper, was wondering what cream painted walls with paper just on chimney breast would look like....or is paint and paper together a faux pas???

help please! if i bugger it up i have to live with it as theres no more money!

The idea of 3 different shades of 1 colour sounds good and because it's a big room you could probably get away with a bold colour.

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I like the 3 shades of one colour idea too. What colours are you thinking of & what kind/period of house is it?
Stay away from stripes unless you reeeeeaaalllly love them. They are one of the fastest things you can get fed up of!

i wanted it all to be fairly neutral colours really, without looking too bare/bland.
It's an old terraced house.

have a new brown leather suite arriving in a few weeks, so was thinking creamy beigey colours.

sick of my patterned wallpaper and want to go plain/painted but worried it might end up looking a bit hospital like!

I live in an old terrace house too and we went for something to suit the sofa colours. If it was me I'd go for 2 colours, dark below dado and on the chimney breast and ligher above and on ceiling. You want to try same shade/tone as sofa but obviously not as dark.

Agree with Jack, stay away from stripes.

Don't faff about with wallpaper if the plaster is good but if you really want to, use it below dado and chimney

Let us know how you get on

Can I say that the three shades is not a good idea, the previous owners did it here and it was just plain wrong.

Is it a dado rail and a picture rail? If so, I would paint the part of the wall below the picture rail in the darker of your chosen shades, and the area above the picture rail in a lighter shade.

We had this done in a Victorian terrace that we used to rent out and it looked lovely (shades of cream).

I think 3 colours and you'd defo feel like your in a hospital!!

3 shades is actually very difficult to get right. I would match the top section with your ceiling (in our case white) then maybe have two shades of cream on the other bits. dado rails and picture rails are a pita in my opinion - we have picture rails in the sitting room and then heavy mouldings and then a dado rail in the hallway (which is v open to the sitting room). After much umming and ahhing I worked on the principle that less colours = less chance of getting it wrong.

You definately want to keep it as light as you can but deeper colour on the bottom will give it impact. You just got to get the 2 shades right