A House of a Different Color

Paint samples on the house.

Now that I've completed scraping and priming the outside of the existing house, it's time to pick a paint color.

Zita and I had a general idea of the color that we wanted to paint the house. We had seen some other houses around town that we liked that were painted grey. Zita also had the idea of trimming the house in black.

Of course, when you get to the paint store (Sherwin Williams), there are about a thousand different colors of grey and black. Picking colors is not really my strong suit. Fortunately, Zita is quite good at that kind of thing. She fairly quickly narrowed it down to just a couple of different shades of grey and a single shade of black that she liked. However, looking at paint samples in the store and looking at them on the house itself are two different things.

Sherwin Williams sells "samples" of paint (just under a quart) for a small price that you can have mixed to your color choices. Then you can take the samples and paint them onto several different places on the house so you can see what they look like. It's surprising how different the colors can look on different sides of the house and in different light.

Once we had the paint on the house in several places, including on the brick, it helped us decide pretty quickly that the darker shade of grey looked the best.

Now, if the weather stays decent over the next few weeks (or months), all I have to do is paint it all over again, this time with top coat instead of primer.

Soon, we'll have a house of a different color.

Front porch freshly painted with new house numbers just installed (and silicon still drying).