10 of the Best Paint Ideas I’ve Ever Seen (They’re All Beginner-Friendly!)

Everyone has their own motivation for flipping through house tours and before and afters: Maybe you’re looking for inspiration on how to lay out a living room, or you’re on the hunt for the perfect small-space sofa. One of my favorite things to look out for are brilliant paint ideas.

Paint is a go-to DIY of mine when I’m looking for a way to transform a space — or even just freshen one up. It’s affordable, accessible (you can find it at any local hardware store, or even order it to be delivered to your door!), and extremely versatile. And as far as DIYs go, it’s pretty forgiving: Beginners can take on the work of painting a room or a wall with the confidence that anything they mess up can be easily covered over later. As long as you’re careful to cover floors and furniture, you can’t do much damage!

Below, find 10 of my very favorite paint ideas I’ve seen in house tours over the years. I hope they’ll inspire you to try something new with paint in your own home — and that you’ll share it with us when you do!

A subtle ombre — which was done with four different Benjamin Moore paint colors — makes the staircase in this New Jersey home look positively dreamy. Starting with the darkest color on the bottom and shifting lighter as you climb gives the stairs a visual lift. You could replicate this paint idea in any color you like! 

Replacing the molding around your windows is a pretty big DIY. Painting a new frame around the existing molding to give it a little more oomph? That’s a totally beginner-friendly DIY, and it’s brilliantly demonstrated in the closet area of this maximalist Portland home. While the squiggly shape and the bright pink color skew whimsical, you could take a more serious route by keeping the lines straight and choosing a deep, dramatic color like forest green, navy blue, or even black.

In my experience, small homes have some of the coolest paint ideas — often because paint is used as a tool to help divide up spaces and make rooms seem bigger than they actually are. This checkered dining nook from a 500-square-foot Brooklyn apartment is a great example. I love how the checkerboard pattern is used to make the dining table look like it’s in its own little zone, setting it apart from the rest of space. You can get the look in your own home by outlining squares with painter’s tape before using an accent color of your choice to fill them in.

You’ve seen plenty of examples of painted cabinets before (and if not, check out these gorgeous painted cabinet projects for inspiration), but this idea puts a little bit of a twist on the classic. The owner of this vibrant, nearly all-pink house in Nashville gave her cabinets a unique look by using not one but two colors. After a coat of bubblegum pink, she painted an accent color in a zippy fuchsia around the raised panels for extra oomph.

A ceiling medallion around a light fixture adds almost instant charm to any room in your home. But if you want to call attention to your lighting without spending more than a few bucks, a painted ceiling medallion is the way to go. I love the squiggly version featured in this mural-packed Philadelphia home, which uses a bold color that complements the inside of the light fixture. You can pull this project off with a sample pot of paint, or you could even mine your project leftovers for paint that you won’t have to pay a single cent for.

Take framed art to the next level by highlighting it with painted “frames” or color blocking. This example, from a 760-square-foot Harlem home, is one that has stuck with me for ages. There are only three pieces on this gallery wall, but it feels so much more high-impact thanks to the cleverly placed color blocking.

If you’re looking for a way to add just a little bit of whimsy to your space, choose a small area — like a mantel, or maybe a windowsill or single shelf — and paint it with stripes. The fireplace in this New Orleans cottage is painted in the same leafy green as the stripes for an extra-bold look, but I could see a striped accent on a more neutral background, too.

I love the idea of adding color to a whole room without actually having to paint an entire room, which is what makes the running stripe from this Minneapolis house tour so appealing. By plotting out a foot-wide stripe that encircles the entire space, you can give the illusion of lots of color in a lot less time — a DIYer’s dream! I think this paint idea would look awesome in a long, narrow space like a hallway, too.

This UK house tour is absolutely brimming with brilliant paint ideas, but one calls to me especially as a person who struggles to pick just one paint color for a room: the color blocking! I think what makes this one work so well is that all of the lines between the various colors fall along natural seams in the walls and molding, and each color highlights a different architectural feature of the room.

The light peach puts the fireplace wall on display, the terra-cotta color helps emphasize the adjacent closet doors (which are in turn painted to match the fireplace), and the pale green shows off the crown molding and ceiling medallion. The fact that the art and the terrazzo fireplace art also feature the same color palette? Perfection.

Custom wainscoting is expensive, and DIY wainscoting can still require more skills and tools than a beginner DIYer might already have at home. But painted wainscoting? That’s power tool-free, cheap, and completely customizable. The easy version is simply color blocking half the wall with a darker color to mimic a chair rail; for a fancier upgrade, try something like the scalloped look from this Nebraska home. The walls in this bedroom are otherwise totally blank, but the fun scalloped pattern makes them feel completely finished.