Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Face Lift for Mi Casa

Ladies and gentlemen, I've got some exciting stuff to show you!!

If you remember, we had a hail storm in early summer and our house suffered some serious siding and roofing damage... cue the insurance-financed new siding and roofing! 

The toughest choice was colors. Our old siding was a cream-ish beige color, with all the trim painted the same color. 



For new colors, we needed something that would look good with the red-ish brick on the front of our house. Now, Eric and I don't often agree on paint colors, so I was very surprised when he agreed with my suggestion for grey siding with white trim and a blue front door. We got a few samples and finally made our choice for a rather dark grey. 


The next step was painting the trim. Oh man was that a pain. The most challenging part was that none of our ladders (nor the ladder we borrowed from our generous neighbor) were tall enough to reach the 2nd story windows. So, I called up the local tool rental places and was able to find a 14 foot ladder for rent for $17/day. And let me tell you - a 14 foot ladder is TALL!


A whole lot of trim painting ensued. Eric's parents helped out 2 weekends in a row.  Thanks :) 
Did I mention we also washed the inside and outside of every window AND storm window? 



Then the really exciting part started - siding! (The truly incredible part was that we didn't have to do any of the work!!)


The colors are a bit washed out in the photo below, but you get the general idea. In reality, the siding color definitely comes off as a mid-tone grey. 

We were feeling pretty good at this point, so we taped up some bright blue color swatches on the front door and left them there for a couple days to see what struck our fancy. (Oh, I forgot to mention that I also spray painted our mailbox white and the handle grey. I think it looks pretty nice if I do say so!)


Okay, back to the door paint color. We were going for something eye catching but not obnoxious.... 
... and we got really nervous after the first coat of Behr's Running Water went on...  YOWZA!!!


But after the second coat, things are looking much better. We still aren't quite sold - we keep waffling back and forth between wanting to keep it as is or wanting to repaint with something a bit more subtle. 


So what do you guys think? Did we hit the nail on the head for 'eye catching but not obnoxious', or are we way past that, into 'crazy people on the block' territory? Seriously, I need some feedback people!!



2 comments:

  1. Wow! Your house looks really amazing! I absolutely love the siding color. About the front door... it's definately eye catching. My personal preference would be to tone it down just a little bit. So sorry...but you did ask!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the comment Gayle (and no need to apologize for your opinion)! I'm leaning toward toning it down a bit too. Right now we're thinking we'll leave it as-is for a couple weeks until we make up our minds.

    ReplyDelete