Dirty Light Blue Gray

On the list of things to accomplish before we can OFFICIALLY finish the garage, is picking out the exterior paint color. You see, for Chris' birthday I got him a basketball hoop to mount on the front of the garage and Chris wants to get the garage painted before we mount it. Which means....we have to pick out our exterior house color. A somewhat daunting task (while we'll be painting the garage now, the rest of the house will have to wait another year or so - windows to replace, stucco to repair...)

This wasn't originally on our "tasks it takes to finish the garage" list, but when I got Chris the basketball hoop, it got tacked on.

I have wandered around and around possible colors for the house over the last year and a half. I've always wanted something light because our home's architecture is pretty interesting, so I don't want to take away from that.

2 things we already need to work around: our lovely yellow front door...

(don't worry, that stucco has since been patched)

...and our blue gutters and garage door (the house trim color).

Armed with a color fan deck and a piece of cardboard I painted the trim color, I sat myself at the front door a couple days ago and went through what colors I thought would look good

I came up with 4 I liked and drove down to HD to get some sample sizes to paint on the side of the garage to see how they looked

Pretty light, huh? I know I know, but I told you I wanted something really light. Chris laughed at my indecision with the colors that looked exactly the same. Why couldn't they have a paint color exactly how I had it described in my head: dirty light blue gray?

I wasn't satisfied. The two on the right were too creamy, and the two on the left were just not right and I couldn't point out exactly why. So I went for round two (like that never happens)

Round 2's colors were a bit more blue/gray (sorry for the bad pic)

I thought I had a favorite, but I wanted to make sure I liked it with the trim and front door color, so I got out those paint cans and put a stripe of each by each color to see how they looked all together (another bad pic, SORRY! That sun is really cramping my paint sample photo style!)

In the end it came down to 2 colors: the two on the bottom left. I really liked the one second from left (Snowflake), but when I painted the trim and door colors next to them, the one on the far left (Silver City) won me over

The one on the left has just a hint of a darker blue to it, which looks really nice in the shade (something the front of the house gets A LOT of). In the sun, both colors look very similar, and really just only a shade away from white, which I really liked because I want the blue trim and yellow door to really pop against the home.

I'm excited to get the garage painted to see how it looks!