Almost There!

Just a day before my parents arrived for their vacation with us we had reached the following stage (of completion):

Also known as "AD" / "Almost Done" we were almost done with painting. Both body colors were up, and all that is left to do is fine-tuning, trim work, and the porch floor.

That will most likely have to wait until after the holidays provided the weather plays along with days that are nice and sunny and not too cold.

The color?
We love it!
We are ecstatic that it turned out almost better than imagined and envisioned here.

Almost there!

After the holidays we will be back with more exterior goodness, but for now, this will have to do (and it does because, omigod, it's so much better than the flaky peeling blue and grey mess from before).

Color Going Up!

With my parents' impending arrival we were buckling down for good on the last free weekend.
Nothing, absolutely nothing is as inspiring and motivating as your parents coming for a visit. After all, you want to show them a little bit of progress, and we'd been talking long enough about painting the exterior so we wanted that baby done (or as much done as the weather allowed).

While it rained on and off on several days throughout the past couple of weeks, that last weekend was just brilliant, despite a weather forecast that stated the complete opposite.

So we decided to get at least the front painted.
No kidding.
In the beginning we had vowed not to start with the front because we had seen the occasional house where -just- the front had been painted while the rest lingered unfinished and forgotten. It's so easy to get sidetracked, so easy to be swept away by Life. We didn't want to risk that. Since we had hired help (Thanks, Mark!) coming to our rescue, however, we thought we were pretty safe in that we would get all the house painted at some point this year.

So here we go, starting with the front.
We had
scraped
sanded
repaired
and
primed
and now, finally, we got to apply paint!

Here's yours truly atop the front porch roof getting started on painting the upstair's Sherwin-Williams' Oakmoss, a dark, sage-y green, color matched in Benjamin Moore paint.

Yes, I'm crazy excited about painting and seeing how lovely the color is turning out. The husband was mighty proud of me of braving the heights - I usually refuse to work on anything higher than 10ft up, but I felt pretty safe on the big ol' porch roof; it was almost like working on solid ground.

While I was up there, the husband and Little Man were down below.

Since you are supposed to paint 'top down' here's what it looked like after the first of two coats of Oak Moss upstairs:

Isn't it lovely?
Isn't the crisp contrast between the green and the creamy antique white just absolutely delicious?
No, the window frames weren't yet painted - good catch!

The order of painting is
1. Top down (start at the top and work your way down)
2. Details and trim last

While upstairs was drying and putting to use every bit of daylight we tackled the downstairs, first painting the ceiling Antique White, then rolling on the first coat of "Bosc Pear" onto the walls.

The change is drastic, almost more so downstairs than upstairs because Bosc Pear is such a warm, rich color - a huge change from the cool pale grey-blue we used to see.

And then the sun went down and night made it hard to see what we were painting so we called it a day!

The next day we would return for Coat II, paying no mind to our aching arms and backs and feet!

White going up!

Much to this short person's frustration, you star painting from the top down. That's the part I cannot reach and where I need the help of strong men who aren't afraid to, you know, wield paint sprayers and rollers at a lofty 20-something feet height and can physically maneuver that beast of a ladder I bought for this purpose.
Me?
I max out at 12' which is a whopping 10' higher now than before we bought our little old house.
Seriously.
I don't do heights very well.
At least not on ladders.

Anyways, since we decided to get rid of the ugly dark trim, Sherwin Williams' "Antique White" colormatched to Ben Moore Exterior paint was the first color to go up.

It's a sweet, soft creamy white - almost beige looking against a bright decorator's white - but it goes on beautifully and will provide just the right amount of clean contrast between our two body colors. Trust me, I know.
I tried.
The first white I'd chosen was just too bright so I mixed my own personal 'right' kind of color which turned out to be a dead match for "Antique White."

See?
Nice and creamy.

It even looked kind of cute with the pale blue-grey that was already on the house ... and for a teeny tiny moment I was torn between continuing with our planned color scheme and just keeping the blue grey. I could see it working with a sea-glass colored porch ceiling, for example.
Very beachy.
Then the sun came out and we went blind.
It was so bright, we felt like vampires skittering into the shelter of the shadows cast by the trees, hiding from the searing burn of the sunlight reflecting off the house.

That made the decision really easy: Oakmoss and Bosc Pear it is!

Primer!

Slowly but surely we are getting closer to color photos! I know this is a rather slo-mo type of reveal but it was a slo-mo kind of project, and that's not even counting the time it took us to figure out the color scheme in the first place (read about it here, and here, and here ...oh, and here).

Unbelievable but true, it took us two whole years to really decide on our exterior paint project (so massive KUDOS to you if you can make it happen faster than that).

After two years of waffling over the 'right' color, squirreling money away, doing research first on professional painters and how much it would cost to have the house painted by someone else, then how to paint it ourselves to save money, and then, finally, buckling down and getting started FOR REAL, we and our little old house were finally (three weeks ago, to be honest) more than ready for

PRIMER!

I know. How exciting!
Well, it was for us.
Seeing the white (for downstairs) and dark grey (for upstairs) primer go up finally made things real for us. We were actually going to get our house painted.
This year!
No more peeling paint.
No more sad dingy blue grey.

Even with just the white primer it looked SO MUCH better already.

I realize I'm an evil tease dragging this process out over so many short posts but this comes preeeeetty close to how 'fast' we progressed, and I knew we wouldn't get anything done during my parents' visit over Thanksgiving.
Bear with me - it'll be worth it (at least that's what we think - we loooove the end product)!

A Side Job

Owning a house always comes with a learning curve. Depending on your budget for repairs and updates it is more or less steep.
In our case, and especially in case of huge project such as an exterior paint job, the learning curve was pretty daring and came with new experiences.

For example: siding repairs.





Termites, bad prep work committed by former owners, and weather had wrought quite a number on some of the boards of our wooden siding, and those had to be repaired one way or another.

I filed the paperwork for the Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) to make sure all our siding repairs were legit and sanctioned by our Historic Preservation Commission, picked up a couple of boards of bevelled pine siding matching our own at Carolina Lumber (nicest people ever!), and set the husband up with a couple of videos  and articles on This Old House on how to repair wood siding.


Like this video for example.

We started with a very simple spot - no piecing, no funny monkey business, just plain replacement of one board.

Well, our first trial run cost us three boards in the end since prying the old boards - even the old, rotted, broken one - was harder than we thought and it looked, and before we knew it we'd cracked a second one and a third. Oy! They always make it look so easy on TV!

Fortunately, after that things started looking up (it's like calibrating your feet for a new car and a more touchy pair of brakes), and we replaced a few other spots with no problem at all.
It is rather straightforward process, after all: pry out or cut out broken piece, measure new piece in place, cut, nail, caulk seams. Done!

That being said, when the husband came to fix the siding on the upstairs addition (the area containing our dressing room and master bath) things got difficult again, mainly because a previous owner had used and patched with -three- different types of siding.




In order to make up for the discrepancies in board widths and the resulting gaps, we had to remove quite a few boards - more than we'd originally planned.

That required another trip to Carolina Lumber (not really a hardship at all - they are very close by and really nice and helpful, not to mention surprisingly affordable) and more siding boards. A small blow to our tight budget for our exterior job but no budget buster (unless we hit another crazy snag like this).

The husband spent an entire weekend trying to match things up, fitting boards, measuring, and cutting perched on the roof of our little downstairs (enclosed) porch.
Steep learning curve, I'm telling you! There were quite a few choice words directed at tools and planks, but in the end, he figured things out and made me a mighty proud wife.

Nailed it!

Prep Party Part II

Sad but true we needed two whole weekends - Saturday and Sunday - from Sun up to Sun down to get to the next step in our preparation for the exterior paint job.
Let's break it down again:

1. Wash
2. Scrape
3. Sand
4. Repair
5. Prime
6. Caulk
7. Paint

We only feathered out old patches of paint that wouldn't come loose on the first floor in high traffic areas. We decided early on that we would not try and go for a 'smooth as a bay's behind' look - our house was a 100 years old and we were proud of its marks that tell its story, and we wanted to enjoy the new look in this decade.
So no infra-red paint remover tool for us, no chemical strippers, no heat gun. Just pure elbow grease.
Even so we spent an entire weekend feathering paint and smoothing out the couple of boards that took the hit when we learned to pick the right pressure for the power washer.

 We did wear proper protective face masks to keep from breathing in harmful dust, and we covered the ground with tarps to contain the mess as much as possible.

 In the end we spent -three- whole weekends preparing the house to the point where we could prime. Hallelujah!

Here it is, moments before the paint sprayer dipped into the primer for the first time! We taped off the 'new' aluminium windows only because they are smaller, with narrower trim and as such more prone to over spray.

Other than that, it was "Fire at will!"

Prep Party Part I

Nothing provides more motivation to "get'er done' than a visit from the parents.My parents hadn't visited us at our little old house in three years - health issues had thrown us a curve ball, and Germany -is- quite a bit away, and it's not a trip you take lightly, or on a weekend. Not if you don't own your own jet. Which we don't.

So, three years since their last time, and of course we wanted to show some progress in regard to all our grand home improvements plans.

And the biggest project we could possible force into a tight deadline?

Painting the exterior, of course!

We got a helping hand from my co-worker Mose who provided back-up and equipment to power wash our little old house. It helped remove some of the loose paint but really only aimed at washing off the grime and funk of decades. You have to be careful with the old siding since most commercial grade power washers are too strong and cause more damage than good.

You can literally rip your siding planks to shreds washing out the soft wood pulp between the grain. Ugh!

We gave the house a good scrubbing ending up incredibly filthy ourselves. Man! There's nothing that gets you wetter and dirtier than power washing anything. And don't you dare consider power washing yourself - takes the skin right off! Not a good thing!

Here's the husband scrubbing down the stairs. The poncho is really just for show - he was just as dirty and wet as me who skipped the protective gear!

Afterward we scraped.
And scraped.
And scraped.
There was quite a bit of loose paint that had to be removed, carefully, catching and discarding it in bags to contain any possible lead.

More scraping along the front elevation of our little old house. The front, facing mostly north, wasn't bad at all. Here the peeling paint was minimal, really, compared to the rest of the house and especially the western elevation. That one was a -real- mess!

At the front most of the failing paint was along the window frames due to ancient paint build-up.

 

 

Little Man was a great big helper, and really enjoyed getting to hang out on the roof of the porch -with- permission from the parental units.
We even ate lunch picnic style out here because the weather was fantabulous and the view is really nice.

After lunch there was more scraping.
And more scraping.
And some more after that.
There was a lot of peeling paint caused mostly where some bright mind had decided to caulk the underside of the siding. That inhibits an old house's natural ability (and need) to breathe, and in the end the moisture that collects there causes the paint to fail. Geee, they could have saved so much money on caulk and time -and- gotten a longer lasting paint job out of it, but no.

We spent a lot of time prying old caulk out of every nook and cranny on the underside of the siding our house. As one contractor once explained to me: " Imagine pushing your house underneath a waterfall. That's how you want to caulk'em."

And caulk we did ... two weekends later!

Oh No, You Didn't!

Oh yes, we did.

I know I said that 2013 would be all about getting our Little Old House's exterior spruced up. A whole new color for the ol' gal.

I wrote a detailed email about how we chose our color scheme here and even created some clip art to show everything went together, both on our house and for the big picture aka our blog of the 'hood.

Then this happened - husband finally spoke up that he really didn't like the colors we'd agreed on, and all our plans went, well, to hell in a handbasket. Back to the drawing board it was. After all, the exterior is such a big project that you better 'like' if not 'love' what you put on there since repainting it wasn't going to happen.

We spent weeks painting different shades of blue on the back of our house, until we finally broke down and mixed out own because they all were either too blue, too light, too dark, too grey, too green - well, you get the idea.

Then summer rolled around and all of our plans came to a screeching halt.
Sloshing halt, really, because last year's summer was hot and rainy and miserable.
Mosquitoes grew to the size of helicopters, it was hotter than Hades, and if it wasn't, it sure was pouring buckets whenever we had spare time to actually do paint the house.

The back of our house continued to look like this throughout the remainder of the year. Fall came, and with it nicer weather. It was still wet - wetter than in past years - but there were plenty of nice weekends, just right for painting, and yet.
No painting got done.
We deliberately procrastinated.
No kidding.
I was so not ready to pull the trigger, no matter how much I hated the scruffy look of our little old house.
Then, just a little over a week ago, I caught myself playing with the Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer, and I realized that while we found a blue we liked, I never quite liked it for our house.

Our little old house just isn't a house that wants to be blue.
History repeating, eh? Now it was my turn with the 'I don't hate it, but ...' spiel.

Before confronting the husband with what had been nagging on my mind for the past months, I kept on playing. I'd recently hit a Craftsman style streak (more on that sometime within the next couple of weeks) and dug deep into the concept of Craftsman style sensibilities. While our house is not a proper Craftsman-style house - its architecture is a bit muddled down - it's a bit Craftsman and Bungalow influenced. We'd already talked about emphasizing rafter tails and such, but playing with the color program I decided to give our little old house a Craftsman make-over, even going so far as to playing with a two-tone color scheme.

And BAM!
That's when I found it: THE color scheme (no, really, this is it).
The moment I painted on the two-tone color scheme on the back of the house (virtually, of course), the architecture of the back of our house where all original features have been lost due to the enclosing of the two small back porches and the second-story addition which now houses our master bath and the dressing room started to make sense again instead of looking bland and faceless!

 I know that it's difficult to understand my excitement over this color scheme when all you have to look at are these pictures. They really could be better ... you know, this one was taken in really rotten weather and it doesn't do anything to prettify the back of our little old house (nor does the stack of wood leaning against the a/c compressor).

 This one - taken and modified online with the color scheme - I snapped to show the husband how the two-tone color scheme would look on the side of our house. He was a bit concerned at first about having a two-tone house in green (a dark sage green/ Sherwin-William's "Oakmoss") and gold (a rich, earthy gold / Sherwin-William's "Bosc Pear") next to a green house and a yellow house, but these colors are very different from the colors of the other two houses so there's nothing to poke fun at.

The real kicker came when I bought two testers with these colors to try them on the house. Nothing is more important than to test your paint on the object of your desire - no, really. Light, sun exposure and shade, and even the texture of your siding make a -huge-  difference in how you perceive your color and how true it will look compared to your paint chip. In all cases prior to this, every color I'd picked required massive ttweaking - going darker, going lighter, going greyer, etc.

These two?
Spot. On.
 And then I discovered this gem in one of my books - a historic craftsman influenced historic house with a two-tone color scheme (green on top) and and off-white/yellow at the bottom. Score!

I'm so stinkin' excited to get started painting I'm rotating on the spot while waiting for an available weekend with good weather!

Knuckle-Busting Fun

If you thought restoring a staircase required a lot of scraping and sanding, wait until you start painting an exterior. Ha!

Our exterior clearly needed help and we had ...well, have areas where the paint is failing, peeling off in small and large flakes. Since paint is an important shield for your house defending it against the elements, pests and your neighbour's disdain, painting the exterior of your house is a task that rolls around every 10-15 years along with a bit of spot painting and touching up every now and then. Our Little Old House was beyond the point of touching up and since we also felt like giving it a new color, we decided to go the whole nine yards this year.

After helping Preservation SOS with two house projects I was convinced we could do it ourselves. It's not difficult, just labor intense because you are essentially painting a big box. Squirreling money away each month allowed me to buy new ladders, and just two weeks ago I picked up a large paint sprayer along with the usual odds and ends for painting such as drop cloths, extra scrapers, roller brushes, brushes, tape, caulk, and more.

Last week and especially this past weekend we finally allowed ourselves to pick at the paint flakes.

It felt SO good!
Like allowing yourself to pick on a peeling sunburn.

Sure, the novelty of  large scale scraping paint, patching and caulking outside will wear off soon (or at least I suspect it will) but right now, we're on a roll, baby!

We also took the opportunity to remove some of the old 'ghost' wiring and plumbing on the outside of our little old house. Generations of phone and tv providers had left their mark on the outside with wiring going nowhere, and there were two pvc pipes sticking out of the side of the house not connected to anything at the top and the bottom, and so we snipped and caulked and, boy, did that make a difference!

Good riddance!

It will look so much neater and cleaner once it's painted.

The plan is to finish prepping the backside of the house next weekend. Fortunately there is not much to repair, just the window trim of the kitchen window is showing signs of wood rot that will need repairing, and of course, our little old house needs a refresher run of caulk along the trim (not the underside of the siding - that will just cause moisture issues in the long run because historic homes need to breathe).

So, we are pretty sure that the knucklebusting fun (my husband's and my knuckles are all busted from accidentally scraping over the siding - bah!) we have had with our house's backside will wrap up this coming weekend and that we finally will get to apply a coat of primer!

After that it's on to paint, baby!
I can't wait to see how it'll look!

Scraping By (Yours Truly)

And so it begins: project "Exterior Painting" is finally underway!

Equipped with an assortment of paint scrapers, paint eater tool and sanders we have embarked on the great task of prepping the little old house's backside for painting.
Ugh.
Ugh, I say!

There is quite a bit of peeling paint on the first floor level,like a sunburn's blistering and peeling, and finally we are allowing ourselves to pick at it. That part is really satisfying and rewarding, you know, just like picking at a peeling sunburn on your shoulders.

I'm sure the novelty of scraping paint outside will wear off soon (it was kind of fun doing that on the inside at first too before it turned into a mind-numbing chore), but so far, we are progressing at a steady pace and it comes with the added benefit of slowly acquiring a tan.

No worries, folks, we tested for lead and the result confirmed my suspicion that our house no longer has its original siding: it tested negative for lead. We still do wear face masks when scraping and sanding, and collect the paint scrapings in plastic drop cloths because breathing in paint particle and wood dust isn't good for you at any rate, but at least we don't have to worry about lead.

Yay for small blessings!

This is a -huge- project, even though our house is a "little" old house, and we will be tackling it one side of the house at a time figuring that seeing a completed side will be reward and encouragement to tackle the next side.

That means there will be fewer updates, too. I won't bore you with updates on how many squarefeet we scraped today, tomorrow, next week, but unless the weather turns to crap, interior projects are mostly on hold for the time being.
I'm thinking I might go for a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule so you'll at least know when to swing by for/  expect an update.

We Got The Blues

Our little back porch turned storage shed has seen close to every shade of blue under the sun over the past couple of weeks - dark blues, light blues, greenish blues, purplish blues, greyish blues. Squeaky blues, happy blues. Dramatic blues, boring blues.

I have amassed an impressive collection of little Valspar paint tester jars (if you want to test a blue, ping me. Odds are I have a tester for it ...heh).

Then I stumbled across Rebecca's blog "Simply Natural Mom" and discovered the beautiful color scheme she and her family (and neighbors) chose for their Craftman-style home which is just a few years younger than our little old house. She was so nice to tell me the secret of the color scheme for her house because it looks just perfect!

Unfortunately, in the end, Benjamin Moore's "Hale Navy" looked just too dark on our house - more blackish navy - and it just didn't work but "Roxbury Carmel" is as delicious as it sounds and is a lovely accent color! Instead of "Barely Beige" for our trim color we are currently fancying "Monterey White" from Benjamin Moore's historic color collection.

So which blue did we choose, you wonder?

In the end, I took several testers and mixed my own: a greyish blue that's deep and rich, not too blue and not too grey and not too dark. We are calling it "Stuckenberg Blue" in honor of the first couple moving into our little old house when it was brandnew and smelled of fresh plaster and paint.

I tested the whole color scheme on the back entrance, and I have to admit I do love it. Who'd have thought?

We definitely learned just how important it is to test exterior colors on a larger scale and in different areas on your house. Not only does paint look about two shades lighter outside (as opposed to one or two shades darker inside) but the light your house receives also has a huge impact on how colors will look. Picking color from a photo on houzz.com didn't work either - what looked like a stunning deep blue-green color on the house in the picture, turned out to be a muddy dark green on ours ...ugh! No-thing like the vibrant color in the photo.

So test, test, and test again.

Even if it turns your house into a crazy looking piece of modern art.

The Best Laid Plans Of Men And Mice

No, we don't have a pest problem.
No exterminator needed, thank you very much.

I wrote about some exterior color scheme musings way back in November last year (read about it here). I have not written about how we painted our back porch several different shades of sage green and blue-green, and how, after eliminating colors along the way as too light, too green, too dark, too blue, we ended up with the back porch mostly painted in Valspar's "Sea Port."

I even liked "Sea Port" combined with a creamy light ocher trim color (because the husband kept talking about 'yellow trim').

All was well until ....
....until the husband declared that "Yeah, that color doesn't do anything for me. Really."
Wait a second ... Whaaaat?
The husband amended his first statement with "Well, I don't hate it."

Yeah, little did he know that that statement wasn't making things any better. Turns out that the husband has his heart sort of set on a blue house. With yellow trim. He even found one house in our neighborhood with that color scheme.

It's ugly (the color scheme, not the house).

I firmly vetoed the yellow trim part, especially after showing him hundreds of pictures of blue houses, all of which sport crisp white trim, but trying to be a good wife I agreed to trying on blue for size, even though I never liked it for our house on the Sherwin-Williams' Color Visualizer.

The things you do for your husband ...
So for the past week I've sequestered myself with paint fans and chips and samples trying to find a blue we both like and that looks good on our house.

So far, there are Sherwin-Williams "Tempe Star" and "Refuge", Valspar's "Bungalow Blue", "Magnet Dapple", "Prussian Cadet", and "Granite", and Benjamin Moore's "Hale Navy" and "Narragansett Green."

Turns out the light plays a real number on how you experience any of these colors.

I wish somebody would just tell me what color to paint my house ...

One Upping It

After a lot of fun with the new trim router aka "Mighty Mouse" and going crazy with excitement over all the things we can do with all the fun router bits we are going to add to our collection over time, we put our money where our mouth is and gave three 2x6 pressure treated pine boards chamfered edges courtesy of our 45 degree chamfer bit.

Wearing eye protection and a breathing filter, of course. Inhaling saw dust isn't a good thing at the best of times, and a really bad idea when it's been treated with all kinds of chemicals to make it rot- and insect-resistant.

Then we switched sites, and moved tools and boards to the front porch. Some more measuring, a quick cut for a good fit, and we were in business!

We now have beautifully chunky porch railing. They are rock steady and sturdy and just lovely!

  

They make great additional seating for both people and porch cats alike. Now our porch actually looks like a porch.

 

I can't wait to paint them. And the house. Especially the house.

Color Scheming

Paint is such an easy fix, and often an inexpensive way to sprucing things up, giving old things a new lease on live.
True dat!
I'm not afraid to try new colors, to whip out the spray paint like a triggerhappy Gringo, but when it comes to this one project, I'm a real 'fraidy cat hiding underneath the covers and thinking ...and thinking ...and thinking ...

It's not like you can just repaint the whole exterior of your house if you decide you don't like the colors you picked after all. Well, technically you could, but who - right in their mind - would??

Fact is, the Ugly Duckling needs a fresh coat of exterior paint. A blessing and a curse wrapped into one neat bundle is that there are no requirements, no rules to follow in determining the color scheme on your house in our historic district. None. Nada. Some general guidance - yeah, but no hard and fast help, historic examples, etc. If you want to paint your house Barney purple or Pepto Bismol pink - so be it. Fancy a house with a John Deere color scheme? Have at it! Feel like channeling your inner Rainbow Brite? Rock on!

And if you area historically inclined traditionalist like me, you have some research carved out for you. Thanks to the evergrowing internet this is now easier than it was decades ago. Just a quick little googling provided me with color palettes from 1910-1920 giving me a general idea of which colors were hip back when our Ugly Duckling was built.

 

This small color palette from 1916 is expecially neat since it gives you suggestions for color combinations (trim and body).

Here is another palette from 1918 (I believe) with more color choices. Hurra!

After browsing a bit online, learning that a proper historic color scheme consists of at least three and sometimes as many as a dozen colors, picking up every available exterior paint pamphlet from the box stores and wrecking our brains just what colors to pick, we also learned that you should consider the houses surrounding your house.
Heh ... now things get really interesting.

You see, our neighbor's house is bright apple green. Bright, happy, glow in the dark green
Anything looks sad and drab right now to it, really, especially our little grey Duckling house with its dark blue-grey on blue-grey color scheme.

The remaining houses on our block are more in keeping with the Craftmanstyle sense of color: earthy browns, brick, sage greens and moody blues.
Then, one day, I came across this particular two-story Bungalow-style influenced house on "The Daily Bungalow.
Cue: angels sing.

 

It is so so SO pretty! And stylewise, it's related to our Ugly Duckling with its strong horizontal lines, the one over one sash windows, the full front porch and the gable with its sturdy brackets. And the color scheme makes my knees go weak, even though I'm not really a fan of cream colored trim.

I count four colors: a sage green for the body of the house, a light cream for the trim, and two accent colors: a darker cream - ochre on the barckets, possibly the rafter tails and details on the columns and a terracotta color for the porch floor, steps and sashes.

 

The husband and I are still debating whether to use a sage green as the body color for our Ugly Duckling or to go with our first idea of choosing a muted blue-green instead to bridge the color gap between our happy green neighbor on one side and the chocolate and moody blue bungalows on the other.

 

This is what our block breakdown would look like with the new color scheme applied. It seems to pull the overall street color scheme together really well, doesn' it?

So, we've been busy testing paints traying to nail down that perfect that not-turquoise, not-teal , but perfect shade of blue green we have on our minds.

It's not as easy as it sounds although I do believe we have a really really promising candidate in Valspar's "Sea Port." In order to find the right kind of cream color to go with it though, I think I'll hop over to the paint store and have them color match paints to the Bungalow picture. Maybe we should try a sage green for the body color. Just for kicks and giggles, you know? We have until next spring before having to  startg on this project, one side of the house at a time, and we really want to be sure we pick colors that we will love and that work for the house. Once it's painted, that's it. I don't think I will have any desire to paint it a second time for a couple of years afterward.