color therapy

 i love color!! when shopping for our house my husband and i dreamed of all the colors that we'd like to paint in all the different rooms. when we found this house we were sooo excited that it was painted in all different good, coordinating colors. not colors we'd choose but nice ones. a lot of the colors have stayed as is, however, the downstairs family room was a very strange wood panelling. strange as in "hunt-the-deer-and-quail" themed scenery on it. we took it down only to reveal more dark brown wood grain panelling.
 "enough!" i said, "i'm just painting it!" and off we went to choose colors.
 originally this room was a playroom and we wanted it to feel like fun. not too stimulating but not too calming. with a that in mind my husband and i choose a granny smith apple green for two walls, a deep aqua blue for the other 2 walls and a peachy orange on all the trim. this did not make the play room feel fun and playful as we hoped. instead it felt more like an ice cream parlor at the beach. it didn't bother me but my husband would not enter the room at all. he said the colors "bothered" him.
 currently the room has been turned into a family room. we scored an old couch, found clean and free, on some one's front porch, a chaise lounge, free from a friend who was getting rid of it, and a reclining chair, again free, just off the side walk at another friends house. no shame here - i love usable and free =D
 the next color we choose was orange. good friends of ours  have a really wonderfully painted office of orange with navy blue trim. it looks fabulous and i feel cheerful whenever in it. little did i know that my husband was excited about the orange because he though we'd be moving into a more hockey themed room. more specifically? a philadelphia flyer's themed family room. no joke - he had another think coming! we really liked the orange and it tied nicely into the fireplace as it has a bit of orange in the stone. can you hear the big but coming? it was a very stimulating color - great for an office, not so great to relax and watch movies in, which is what we do the most in this room now.
 sticking with the theme of free, a friend of ours had two gallons of a pretty blue paint that i'm calling "periwinkle pause" and they didn't have plans to use it. last week i painted the trim and two walls this color - i love it! i do have plans on painting the rest of the room but being a busy momma, i can only do so much at once. the color feels calm and it's a nice feeling. the room does seems dark but i have big plans on brightening it up by recovering all the old mismatched furniture. ( a tutorial may be in the feature =D )
 it feels a little like we moved out of an orange traffic cone and into the sky :) here's the color difference:

so what do think? are you emotionally effected by color? when you think about painting a room, do you consider what you'll be doing in that room first?
thanks so much for reading a spending a little time in our neck of the woods :)