MAKING PROGRESS...I THINK

Do you remember my post from last year where I asked for help deciding what color to paint our house exterior?  If not (or you need a refresher), you can see that post here.

This is not my house.  Example of house painted with Olympic paints...
color Prairie Dust, one of our test samples

I have good news...we have FINALLY decided on a paint color!!!!! Yes, I know a year is a long time to take to make that kind of choice isn't it?  No really, hesitation on color choice was not the reason we didn't get the house painted last year as we had planned.  What it really boils down to is we are afraid of heights.  Just kidding.  What really happened is we had decided it would be best to hire this job out.  While we are DIY kind of people we just didn't think we had it in us to tackle this sort of job.  Painting a two story house without help is a HUGE undertaking to say the least.  However, our house is in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint and the estimates to have a professional come in and do it was quite honestly...JAW DROPPING.  $3000-$6000.  They can't be serious.  Our house isn't that big!  So we ARE going to do it ourselves after all.  Yes we are, and we are going to do it NOW...'cause if we wait until next year, we will be replacing the siding instead of just paint, lol.  Besides, why hire someone when we are healthy, capable people, right?  Sometimes I question these things, hahaha.

No this is not my house either.  This is an example of a house painted with Olympic paints...
color, Gray Marble, another of our test samples

We have started the scraping and sanding process...this is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for two people who work full time and have children living at home.  I can't imagine what we were thinking when we decided to do this on our own.  Couldn't we have just gotten a loan? HA..........but so far we have one side pretty much ready to go.  Yes, one whole side (I am so proud of us!!)  and we have only been working on it for about two (or three) weeks using every spare moment we can find.  At this rate it will be WELL into autumn (or maybe even winter) before the paint goes on, but we ARE making progress...

This IS my house.  Yeah, pretty grim looking at this point!

Now picking a color...that was much easier!  Our choices were...

Go classic and keep it white, add black shutters and red door (a look I absolutely love).  

Go light gray (with black shutters and red door).  A look I also love.  

Or we could go with brick/barn red...love.

or mossy green (one of my favorite colors in the whole world).

Blue, yellow and tan were out of the running simply because they are my least favorite house colors. 

Now, after asking all you wonderful bloggers for your insight and opinion, the polls showed that we should go with the classic white, black and red combo.  A close second was the gray, black and red combo.  The third choice was moss green.

So we, the hubs and I, (well mainly me as the hubs don't really care, lol) used deductive reasoning in picking our perfect color...

We opted out of white because we have some architectural details like this beautiful pediment around the front door that we wanted to highlight and white on white would not work well for doing that...

That left gray, moss or red.  We opted out of red because although we love it, didn't think it would match the style of our home and would be a little too bold in our neighborhood which left gray and moss, choices we both love...SOOOOO...we tested a few samples of gray and moss that were examples in the Valspar and Olympic exterior brochures at Lowes.

Our choices were Prairie Dust and Gray Marble by Olympic paints (examples of houses in those colors shown at the top of this post) and Gray Silt by Valspar.  I must say, I'm so GLAD we tested because it really made our decision A LOT easier.

Once we put the three samples on the side of the house our choice was clear.  We are going with Gray Silt a beautiful mossy gray green.  Prairie Dust was a definite NO (kind of looks like puke)...and while we liked Gray Marble, we liked Gray Silt better.  Besides, the house next door is a gray similar to Gray Marble and we want something different.  (See like I said, deductive reasoning!!) So there you have it, Gray Silt is our color choice.  EASY!!!!

I must admit I am a little scared to paint the house a color as I have never seen it in anything other than white.  However, I am looking forward to the change and I really think it's going to look awesome...or at least I hope so...'cause the hubs has already warned me that we are only doing this ONCE so the color had better make me happy...period, end of discussion!!!  Kind of wondering now if I should just keep it white....NAH!!!






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