Ceilings truly are a blank canvas for your creative expression, and as a bonus, you don’t have to worry about smudgy fingerprints or furniture nicks. And painting your ceiling is a budget-friendly way to give any room in your home a new, inviting look. With a stunning ceiling to look at, it’ll be easy to keep your chin up! Make a small room or room with a low ceiling feel larger by keeping the color contrast between the walls and ceilings to a minimum.

Before you begin to paint, consider wall imperfections and other factors. High-gloss paint offers greater durability and is very easy to clean. If your wall is less than perfect, however, high-gloss paint can enhance the imperfections. Flat paint will do a much better job of hiding imperfections, but it's much easier to damage than high-gloss. Eggshell is a great middle-of-the-road option.

Painted furniture can freshen up the look of any space—and you can easily change the color to coordinate with a room's color scheme.

When choosing furniture and accessories, choose the fabrics first. This allows you to take any color from the fabric and use it on the walls. It's a simple matter to take a swatch to the paint store and have any color matched.

There's no way to do it without spending a little money -- those little color chips you can get at the paint store are entirely too small to be of any help. My suggestion is to buy a quart of the color, paint a swatch on a wall and look at it during different times of day. That way you can see how it looks in different types and degrees of light. You can paint fairly large squares on the wall where they'll be hidden under a picture.