Our House: Painting the Exterior… How Can Choosing One Color be so Difficult?

Let me just start by saying, I am a decorator… people have paid me to help them select paint colors, lots of them, and lots and lots of paint colors…

with that being said, how in the world can it be so difficult for me to pick just one color for the exterior of ‘Our House’?

I knew the color I wanted… I had a vision for it, and sometimes that can even make it more difficult, because instead of just trying something, you have to find the right color that your brain is thinking…

Also, the color had to look good with the style of house and

with the color of the shingles.

But even with that quandary, there is actually one more thing that makes it even more difficult selecting the right color, I guess the best way I can say it, is that all the rules change when picking colors outside.

I haven’t totally nailed it down, but somehow the sun does almost fade or pale the color from the way it looks inside, but at the same time, pulls certain tones out of the color and intensifies it… I don’t get it, but let me tell you, I experienced it…

To start with, I went ahead and purchased 4 pint sized sample cans mixed up in the colors I thought I would be able to select a winner from…. (these are from Hirshfield’s, a paint franchise local to Mpls/St. Paul, MN area).

After I painted a small section I selected what I thought was the right color, the center one in this pic, I purchased 1 gallon, to start, just in case…

Instead of starting the painting in an easy place, I started in one of the worst places, above the pergola… but that was because the carpenters were coming back right away to put the new roof on, so I had to get that done right away.

The first color was terrible… totally sky blue… awful!

So then I went back and got a tone darker… repainted the whole peak,

feeling like a monkey, hanging up above the pergola… this is from the top of the pergola looking down, I painted over the 1^st color, with the second color.

Unfortunately though, the second color wasn’t much better either… argh!! Back to the drawing board. It looked like a very gray blue color on the swatch, but on the wall outside, it looked totally sky blue, not the vision I had in my head…

So I went back and bought 4 more small cans of paint… since the ones that looked just slightly blue were too blue, this time I chose way more gray blue with more green in it.

The larger back ground color of blue is the 2nd blue that looked too sky blue, then on top of it down the center, I painted smaller swatches of the last 4 colors… ok I think number 4 is going to be the right color.

I now have the whole East wall done and I love it…

Whew… 10 cans of paint later…

Now the ‘pergola turned porch’ needs to be finished, and I need to decide if I’m doing shutters on some of the window, I also have a lot more painting to do… but I’m so glad that I now know what color I’m doing.

 

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