Choosing the Right Garage Door Color

Is your garage door color ready for an update? One of the first things you notice about the front of a home is the garage. While rarely the main focus of a home, it does take up approximately a third of your home's front. Picking the right color for your garage door is important when trying to increase your curb appeal.



In this guide, we will tell you how to pick the right shade for your garage door. You’ll not only learn what to avoid but also how to use basic principles of highlighting and how certain colors work best together. For more concrete examples we will also outline a few specific tips for common home color schemes.

What to Avoid

Before we discuss what you should do, we first need to know a few things that need to be avoided. It's best to avoid what is trendy - while those flashy neon pinks and electric blues may be exciting now they probably won’t be a few years, or even months, down the line. That being said there is still a lot of room for what you can do, so don’t feel like you are hammered down to having just a handful of colors on your home. While your home can have multiple accent colors you probably want to commit to one for your garage. In addition, you usually don’t want to have the same color for your garage and your front door. The front door is often the attention-grabber and central focus of any home’s exterior.

Highlighting and Hiding

The principles of colors and how they intermingle and make things “pop” aren’t just things that famous painters think about. Certain colors, when used in conjunction with others, can make a piece standout or hide. Your home is a canvas, and you should incorporate highlighting and hiding in the best way that you can. Ask yourself the question: Do you want your garage to stand out or do you want to hide it away so you can accentuate a different part of your house? No answer is wrong and depending on what you have in mind for your home it can vary quite a bit. If you pride yourself on your landscaping and want that to be the focal point of visitors then it's best to pick a color that won’t pull their eyes away from it. Bright and garish hues grab the eye while darker ones push it elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want your garage to be what people see first then bring attention to it by using brighter shades along with those that contrast with the rest of the scheme.

Coordinate the Colors

Even if one wants to bring attention to their garage door they still need to do it within certain reasonable confines. Before you can go coordinating what looks best for your home you should first get a good understanding of how certain colors work with one another. Complementary colors are those that are directly opposite of each other on the color wheel - think of things like orange and blue or yellow and purple. While not unheard of in homes, complementary colors are typically only used for sports teams. The inverse of complementary are analogous - these colors are next to each other on the color wheel, such as green and yellow or purple and pink. Picking the garage door color doesn’t need to be some sort of radical departure of shade either. Monochromes sometimes get a bad name, but these are merely just different gradients of the same color. These gradients can work together and give subtle distinction. Picking a garage door color that is similar to the surrounding walls creates a powerful and imposing look.

Garage Door Neutral Colors

While homes can be as multifaceted as the people that reside in them, there are a few common ones that seem to crop up. Whether they are picked for their innate beauty or just out of sheer pragmatism, these typical homes have a few simple tips on how to best use color with their garage tastefully. Of these, probably the most common is white - if you have a white house you are in luck because of this by far the most flexible when it comes to picking a garage door colors. White is a default choice and can work if you want the solid look stretching from one end of your house to another. Picking the starkest contrast such as black can not only create the pop that you want but can also be seen as sophisticated - making it a great look for more modern homes.



Other neutral colors will probably work great here as well. Think along the lines of gray tones rather than the entire rainbow. Gray homes, while not the blank canvas that everyone imagines, still have plenty of room to work with. When picking a garage door color for a gray home all of the principles for white still apply.

Garage Door Contrasting Colors

In this case, picking a contrasting color doesn’t just mean black - but white can work well too. Typically a gray home works better on the darker spectrum. A burgundy or a deep blue can make it look classy. Your choices can be more limited if your home is made out of more traditional materials, like the brick. Brick isn’t uniform, so you can choose what colors to pull out of it. Whatever garage door color you pick can have an effect on brick color as a whole. The dominating color of the garage can bring out different colors in the brick. You can stick with a primary color scheme or go with whatever the main color of your home is. Neutral tones like brown, bronze and even a darker gray can often work with most brickwork. If contrast is more of what you want just refer back to the color wheel. For example, if you have red bricks then something like a blue door will really stand out.

Trust the Professionals

When upgrading your garage door, it's best to start with the basics. Knowing how colors work together is important. You can highlight or hide a part of your home to choose what features you want to accentuate. Naturally, what works on one home doesn’t work on another. Everything from the color scheme to the homeowner’s personality can make this choice unique. Garage doors often take up a large portion of the front of the home. Picking the right hue can help highlight your home’s strongest features making it a more appealing one to look at. On top of that, we will help you with choosing the right garage style and garage size. If your garage is ready for an update you can trust the professionals at Danley's. Speak to a product specialist and get a free quote today. Find out why over 100,000 homeowners in the Chicagoland area have chosen Danley's for their garage building needs.