Our painters have been hard at work on the outside. And it’s been an exciting transformation thus far.

Because out house is wood siding and it has maybe only been twice since the home was built in the 1950s. That means that the siding is in rough shape in A LOT of places. That means they spent about 3 days just sanding. They moved their way around the house sanding just about everything, including nailing in or removing the plethora of nails that are all over the outside of the house. There are seriously so many nails sticking out, it’s ridiculous. But that’s why it’s nice to have someone else tend to all of them 🙂 At the moment our house looks like it’s spotted

While all the sanding was being tended to, I figured now was better than ever to….PICK THE PAINT COLOR! I was both incredibly excited and scared to do this. I REALLY wanted to pick a dark color, so I pushed myself to go for it. Chris left me alone to go through my plethora of paint decks to select what colors to get samples of

Obviously Merritt is making a great intern.

What was I going for with the color? Well, when I tested out the colors digitally with Benjamin Moore’s color tester I realized that I really needed to go darker than I thought in order to get the impact I wanted. When I thought colors were dark, after I virtually painted them on the house they didn’t seem to be nearly as dark in that application.

So I pushed myself to pick DARK colors. And when I brought all the samples back home from HD and showed Chris he had two reactions: 1) holy shit those are DARK and 2) they all look the same. I admit, that little tiny dot on the top of the paint sample cans makes all the colors look pretty identical. But then I painted them all on a sheet of plywood (two coats of course) and they looked a lot different from each other

Colors go…(top row left and right, second row left and right, third row…etc)

1. Benjamin Moore Blackjack
2. Sherwin Williams Caviar
3. Valspar Deep Bronze
4. Sherwin Williams Bohemian Black
5. Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black
6. Benjamin Moore Wrought Iron
7. Dunn Edwards Cavernous
8. Benjamin Moore Mysterious

The absolutely crazy thing is to see the color variation in all the blacks. And they definitely all looked “BLACK” on the fan deck, so it’s very interesting to see how purple, or blue, or light gray all the colors lean to in a true life application. It just goes to show you that you should never pick a color without trying it out first.

The color that I like the best at first was Tricorn Black (#5). But later in the day when I came home from getting Zoe at day care, I didn’t really like it anymore. Chris liked Mysterious best, and I really liked Wrought Iron and Cavernous, so I took those 3 colors and I painted them in a very large swatch at various spots around the house. A small piece of plywood is nothing compared to how it’s going to look actually on the house

I made sure to paint them in a couple different places. Our porch gets NO direct sunlight EVER. Whereas our garage is in a lighter area. I didn’t like Mysterious as much because it was so blue. I liked it as a color, but not for our house. Definitely too blue compared to the brick. I wanted to pick a color that was a more pure form of gray/brown. I didn’t want a purple or blue tint to it because I thought that would compete too much with the brick. There was a clear favorite for me, but I didn’t want to push Chris in that direction, I wanted him to share which one he like the best too. And the winner…CAVERNOUS! The middle color in the swatch

I love it. It’s black, but it’s got a brown undertone to it. I think it’ll be perfect.

YAY!

And I’m so happy Chris like it a lot too. It ended up being his favorite of the three as well. So that’s super awesome.

Now that we have the base color picked for all the walls of the exterior of the house, we need to figure out what the trim color will be. Unfortunately that will be a little more difficult to pick – we need to select gutters first. For some reason no one ever installed gutters on the house, and so that’s why the fascia and eaves were rotted and moldy. We are definitely getting gutters and downspouts installed on the house, but the gutters will be installed over the fascia, so I’d like the two colors to match. We won’t be able to pick any color we want for the trim, instead I’ll take a sample of the base color and compare that to the selections we have for the gutters. Not ideal, but also not terrible. I’d rather have the gutters and fascia match in color and just work with what we have.

We haven’t gone to check out the gutters yet, but once we do we’ll pick the eave and post trim after that. Exciting exciting! And I super LOOOOOOOVE the base color, so I’m excited to pick the trim colors now! And a door color tooooooo. I’m not as into the blue lately and have been feeling more of a Citron or a Chartreuse

What do you think? I’m still loving how bright it is, and it just feels more cheerful and happy than the blue. We shall see, we shall see 🙂