I’ll never forget the first time we ‘re-painted’ this house. We were under contract and the GC remodeling the house told us we could pick out the colors if we wanted. I was thrilled! I headed to Home Depot and hemmed and hawed and used my color coordinating ‘skills’ and emerged with three colors I just knew would make our little home a stunning Victorian.
A few days later my sister Jill called me. She had driven by the house to check it out and wondered if I knew that they had poured Pepto Bismol all over my house???
No joke, what your brain just pictured is probably accurate. Clearly, I got no ‘skills’. You see, choosing exterior paint colors is not as easy as one would think.
I swear in the store I picked a beautiful rusty red color with two lighter accents…uh no.
It was an expensive mistake so second time around I let the contractor pick the colors and just asked for green and neutral.
So this is what we got.
Meh. No too terrible I suppose. But nothing worth bragging about for sure.
Several years, snow and rainstorms later this poor painted lady started to show her wear. There’s some very cool architectural detail on the house with the boxes and buttons, the sunbursts, etc. But pieces were falling off and because of the boring color palette nothing was being highlighted as it should be.
The cheap wooden house numbers were cracked, split, worn and had even fallen off a couple of times.
Some of the bricks were crumbling and the mailbox, although not related to the paint, had sympathy pains for the rest of the house and started to fall off as well.
Well, last summer we finally reached a point where we could afford to do the house justice with a truly professional paint job. We hired a company (Ireland’s Finest) who also uses a color consultant (an obvious must for me) and whose work I’ve seen around town and loved. 5 colors would have been ideal but a little out of our price range so we settled on 3. And *TADA* here she is:
Ahhhhh, so. much. better.
You can see they were able to replace the missing wooden pieces which makes all the difference.
They repaired the crumbling brick, rehung the mailbox…even painted the stairs. We purchased some metal house numbers and hung them above the door.
Everything just looks cleaner.
Here’s the side by side for the full affect
We LOVE it. So what did we do? Rented her out and moved just a few short months later of course. Go figure.
Jennifer Faris
ourperfektlife 