Oh, HELL yes. I have samples and swatches all over the place and my drywall isn't even finished.

You can use color, but IMHO, stay away from anything remotely primary. Primary makes things look like a nursery school.

You can also pick something you love on a color wheel, then go a shade lighter on the chips. That way you can have a color you like, maybe without a heavy saturation.

There are tons of ways to pick. Just start weeding out what you DON'T LIKE!

I have a ranch. Talk about boxy.

lol - those stupid swatches! I have those and color pamphlets spread all over the place too. I hate it.

Some people are just neutral with browns and tans...and that just seems so plain to me. It's safe though. It's so common.

And then the colored rooms on the paint pamphlets...those look beautiful, but they are done by interior decorators...with just the right colored furniture.

Don't even get me started on real world looks vs. magazine looks. Real world, people have keys and bikes and junk mail sitting on the tables...

ahahhhhh...I hate this part. :-(

One technique is to pick a small room and go BIG on colour in that room, and leave the main rooms neutral. I did tomato red in my 4 X 4 entryway, for example.

Tried red in my living room: didn't work. :-)

What's amazing is how colors go Crayola on the wall and really neutralized colors with just a HINT of color on the swatch read like plenty-o-color on the walls. Look for colors that are muted/grayed out/toned down (which doesn't mean gray or brown but does mean that the colors on the chip are subtle). If you have white woodwork, you don't need much saturation to get a great contrast.

Paint is a hard thing. It's great that there are so many pics on line - and designers and DYI'ers chiming in with their favorites. So much is about lighting, though. I'm awful at it, but I'm not sure many are truly good at it. It seems to me that it really comes down to an incredible amount of testing, from which you get a body of experience - and eventually a list of tried and true colors that work.

Have you looked on Houzz.com?

You could search for say, blue living room and see if anything comes up that you like. If so, I've had pretty good luck posting questions and getting answers from whomever listed the pic.

Paralysis by analysis. Haha. Gotcha. You aren't alone but it will work out if you keep an open eye and an open mind!

Oh lighting...the death of me. Even IF I could be happy with my color choices...once they go up on the wall, they are way brighter than any swatch had them as.

Thank you for the suggestions! Maybe I will go with the Wild Manzanita (dark reddish brown) on the kitchen then, and play it safe elsewhere.

I agree that picking paint is difficult. That said, I don't think "neutral" is always a safe/classic choice. Look at the brown colors used in the 1970s. They certainly went out of favor for a while even though brown is technically something we consider a "neutral". "Neutral" right now is trendy. Thank you HGTV. That's not to say it's a bad choice, but it is trendy. I am not even going to pretend to be enough of a color expert to advise you on how to make a space look "not cheap" with color vs neutrals, but I don't think choosing color itself is naturally going to make a space look cheap. I have seen many neutral (beige, white, etc) spaces that looked very cheap and just as many that did not.

IMO you've got to know what you're doing to pull off really saturated hues. They can go garish very quickly. It's a lot easier to do a grayed-down, muted tone and have it look good. What looks really light on a paint chip will usually be plenty of color once it's on a wall.

Lighting. How dare you use that swear word online!?!.

I'm the one whose gorgeous, gray/sage/green turns turquoise in NATURAL light, yet the cabinets above in the same color, remain gorgeous.

A friend gave me all her blue samples. All 32 of them were too "pretty" for me.

So no one is is immune....

Don't rush this process. You need to start scrapbooking rooms of colors that you are attracted to. I personally cannot pick a color from a small swatch. As mentioned, it will look different on the wall. Lighting is so important too. I decided to paint my bedroom the same color as my lower level tv room. Downstairs it looks like a white/yellow/tan. Upstairs it looked pink! I could not believe it was the same color and so I took a painted stick downstairs. It turned yellow like the walls downstairs.
I like the BM Pottery Barn colors. When you look through the catalogues, most rooms will tell you the paint they used. I have used BM Shaker Beige and am happy with it in my foyer. You can also go back by year by year and see all the colors they highlighted in those years.
Look at old GW posts and you will see some colors mentioned over and over.
I love neutrals, but I have a lot of yellow in my house. What are your favorite colors? Start there.

When I decorated my house, I took my inspiration from textiles I saw in stores. I liked the combination of robin's egg blue, chocolate brown and spring green. My dining room is chocolate brown (with lots of white trim and paneling) with robin's egg blue curtains and chairs. The living room is a muted light blue, with a green sofa, and some dark brown side tables. The kitchen is green. I didn't strictly stick with the color scheme for the kitchen (since it is separated from the other rooms by a hallway), substituting black for brown and using a bit more vivid palette. But the colors all work together.

I only know a bit about color theory, but I figure that designers and artists know a lot. So I look for color combinations that I like in things that other people have designed. You may have to tone the colors down a bit for an expanse as large as a wall. In line with what Anenemity said, colors tend to look much more colorful on the wall than on the chip (or on the bedspread or in the painting), simply due to the size and uninterrupted expanse of the wall.

I love color and as long as the adjacent rooms don't compete but compliment, I say go with what you love!

Post some pictures of the rooms you're thinking of painting and let us see what you're thinking.

Here is how I did it and I get TONS of compliments on my paint choices and I am not a designer by any stretch. I got all these tips from my mother in law who had great taste and style God rest her soul.
I kept my main area neutral (BM Shaker Beige) with lots of dramatic paint accents in the rest of the house. One wall is a very dark brown- this is in my living area with the 15 ft ceiling. I have BM Putnam Beige in the adjoining family room (which is a bit more Yellowish) and white Built in bookcases but with dark maroon(also BM but can't recall the color)in the bookcase boxes. In our Master I did a very dark greenish brown, in my sons room a darker grayish blue and in daughter's room, a very soft, glowing lavender with lots of blue undertones- girly not funeral home lavender.
Keep the main rooms neutral, add pops of color and do what you love in bedrooms that don't flow into one another. Worked for us!

I like colors. When we sell our house we will paint it neutrals. If you haven't been to Sherman Williams yet check out their HGTV color combination brochures. They have a very nice set of collections that contain colors that go together. Each one contains 20 colors to choose from. They also have 3 pictures of rooms layered with 3 different colors so you can get an idea of what they look like. Our house is from the Urban Organic collection. I also like the Sherman Williams samples. They are a quart which gives you plenty to paint on the walls to see if you like the color. Get some poster board and paint one up first before putting it on the wall.

In terms of on-line I've found that Olympic paint has the best upload a photo and paint it program which gives you an idea of how the room will look with new colors. I haven't tried all the programs but this is the one that has worked well for me.