New Colors for the Exterior

I feel like I’m starting to get a little bit of my sanity back as the house gets a little cleaner and as the exterior gets a little bit of paint on it.   School is DONE for the week, and Jimmee and I have plans to buckle down and get a bunch done.  Our list for Wednesday through Friday includes picking the appliances, tearing out plaster, tearing out the old sub-floor, ordering new wood floors, and painting.  I’m so excited to start checking things off.  That brings me to the point of this post, which is that we decided to do the painting on the exterior ourselves, or I should say that I decided this.  :)  I thought about it and just couldn’t justify spending the big bucks to have someone paint it when I’m capable of getting it done myself.  I’m about to have a month off from school so I’m going to take my sweet time and get it done over the next month or two.  We’ll see how this plan works, but I wanted to show you guys what it’s looking like so far.

We have a contract with someone to repair all the rotten/broken wood on the house, but after I signed the contract a couple of weeks ago I haven’t seen the guy.  I need to give him a call to check on things, but in the meantime I’ve just been scraping, priming, and painting around the boards that I think he’ll need to replace.

Here’s a peek at some of the photos of the front.

Primer that went on after lots of scraping

I’ve painted some more of the house since I took these photos, but I’ll save them for an update next week.   It will look a lot better once the board above the porch is replaced, it’s definitely an eyesore.  Well that’s it for today… I’m going to relax tonight and enjoy the freedom from school.  Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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Choosing the Perfect Paint Colors

I think that we have finally made a decision about the house and door color after many, many samples and paint swatches.   Choosing the right paint color for the house is such a big decision, and it’s so easy to pick one that looks good on the paint chip or on a small patch of the house but then turns out to be not quite the right shade for the whole house.  I was so happy to have help from my mom while she was in town- it’s always helpful to have extra input.

The colors shown above are our finalists for the house, trim, porch, and door color.  Everything is getting a fresh coat of paint, even the recently painted porch.  Here are some photos of the samples (painted after the huge rain)…

The one that we’re going with for the siding is the middle color (32), and the trim color is to the left of it.  I don’t have a photo of the shutter and accent color, but it will be a very dark brown and will go on the shutters of course and on the inside part of the window casing.

The new and improved porch color, which will look beautiful with the eggplant door color (I hope).  I really like this olive color with the stone!

These were the original three door color choices, but we decided to tone down the purple a little bit with some white.  I really like the red, but I think there are too many red doors in our neighborhood already so we’re going to go with something a little different.

Here is the lightened purple.

I might play around with the shade some more, but you can get the idea.  We’ll see what people think since we live in a historic area and most people stick to neutral colors with a red or black door.  It’s only a door so I thought it would be a good spot to use a fun color.

That’s it for today.   We’re getting our new roof sometime this week if the clouds stay away and then they’ll be taking down the green vinyl siding and assessing the condition of the wood underneath after the roof.  I really hope the original wood is okay.  I’m not making any bets, though.