Transform Your Home Exterior With Nothing But Paint

Heidi
by Heidi
When summer rolls around each year and we get to spend more time outdoors, I'm reminded by the peeling, bubbling paint that it's time to freshen up the exterior. To keep the task of painting the whole house from becoming too overwhelming, I've been tackling one side of the house each year. It usually only takes a weekend to scrape the peeling paint, pressure wash and apply a fresh coat of linen colored paint. But each summer as I buy another gallon of the same light yellow/cream paint, I dream about changing the color of the house. Reality soon sets in and I come to my senses about the amount of work it takes to completely change the house color. Something changed this summer though and my husband and I decided to seriously consider a drastic change.
Our shingles are a color called Burnt Sienna, which has lots of red and brown tones in it. But if you look closely, there are these dark spots of navy blue/charcoal. Those spots weren't close enough to the grayish black end of the spectrum so I knew any sort of gray house color was out of contention. I didn't want the house to be a dark brown with a brown roof for lack of contrast. Which left the next best option - NAVY!
We bough a tester pot and painted a section on the back of the house. For weeks, we stared at it from the back of the yard. It felt like it could work but we were having trouble pulling the trigger. Our neighbor recommended that we start by painting the front of the house, that way, if we didn't like it from the front yard and street view, we wouldn't have wasted a lot of time and money painting the other sides by that point. So the plan was to paint the front and if we liked it, then we would paint the remainder.
I used an online tool from Benjamin Moore's website to "paint" the house on the computer before we moved forward. Even though we were still on the fence, we bought a couple gallons of paint and jumped in headfirst.
And we couldn't be happier with the results! There are more photos of the transformation on our blog post - with a link at the bottom of this page. We are still undecided on what to do with the garage door, the front door color and shutters, but that will be another project for another day. If you're curious what colors we used, they are all from Benjamin Moore. The siding is Hale Navy, the trim is Steam and the front door is Wythe Blue.
To follow along as we complete our exterior transformation, find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kruses-Workshop/544083725671242
Heidi
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Mel Mel on Mar 06, 2020

    This turned out so lovely.

    Maybe a red garage and front door?

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