Urban Nest

I’m so excited! We’re having our house (exterior) painted. I wanted to do this right after we bought the house, not realizing what an investment it can be. Well, the time has come and the pressure is on to pick the right palette.

When it comes to houses, I’m always inspired by someone else’s better version of my own. I’ve had my eye on a beautiful white house with black trim and a golden yellow door in a slightly (way!) more upscale neighborhood just around the corner. But when it came time to actually picking those colors for our architecturally basic Cape Cod, it occurred to me that a simple color palette would not make a house that does not already stand on this lot.  So I went back to the drawing board with three main considerations:

1. I need colors that won’t demand architectural interest — eaves, dormers, columns, copper piping or a slate roof, for example — of which I have none;
2. I need to choose a palette that will embrace the reddish tone of the roof we do have;
3. And, I really want something bold and compelling, but still very marketable as we do intend to sell before it’s time to paint again.

After some neighborhood sleuthing over the weekend, I came up with these related palettes as inspiration. I still can’t decide which is stranger — snapping photos of my neighbor’s houses while walking the dog in broad daylight or slinking down the street in my car, holding paint chips out of the passenger side window! It had to be done…

I then set out to digitally paint a photo of my own house using these colors to see how it might all play out. I was quickly frustrated by the major imperfections of online painting and my general lack of Photoshop skills and decided to use a standard, but similar, stock photo on the Valspar site. This house definitely has more of that architectural interest than ours, but the basic components are similarly framed, and the application was easy to use.

The painters come today to prep the house so I’m off to pick up a few gallons of primer and a couple of samples. I’m sold on some version of taupe and ivory (image 3 or 4) to be determined later today after we try a few out, but I think I’ll wait to decide on the door color until later in the week.

Here’s a snapshot of our house today:

Anything I need to know before we take the plunge? I can’t afford to re-paint a disastrous color selection, and I’ve been known to make a few those!

Tags: house paint

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 10:59 am and is filed under Build the Nest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.