Exterior Updating

We are finally biting the bullet and painting the house.

The Sunday afternoon we pulled up in front of the open house almost six years ago (without any intention to buy it) I said, "Cute, cute house. Needs a new paint job though. The colors are a little whack."

That night we put an offer on the house, whack colors and all.

Every time I showed someone photos of our new house I made sure to preface the entire conversation with, "Oh, this is the color now, but we'll be painting it soon."

And here we are, five and a half years after owning this house and it's still covered in the light blue siding, crayola Kelly green trim and pinky tan brick.

But not for long...

Here is the color palette I put together and that we both agreed on. Finally.

For the last five and a half years we've pulled color scheme after color scheme together, all of them being fine and looked right for our home but without a plan to paint, who knows what I did with all of those options. So when our neighbor recently had their house painted and the painter gave us an amazing deal to do ours too, we had to start all over again selecting colors. We tried probably 50+ different combinations. Everything from light blue, red and gray to a monochromatic blue scheme. One day shortly after I had returned to work and didn't have a project to work on yet, I Sherwin-Williamsed our house and messed around with colors until I came up with these.

So, in a very crude rendering, here is where we hope to go. (Note: the photo is from 2004 and our shrubs and tree are now huge and block too much of the house for me to use to test paint schemes).

I've gotten some mixed reviews about it, but I like it and Paul likes it, so it's what we're going to do. I mean, when you're the person living with it and paying for it, it should be something you like, right?

We are going to keep our existing house numbers that are to the right of our front door:

But the mailbox could use a replacement. The mailbox we currently have is dated and looking worn. I want something simple, clean and cheap.I'm thinking one of these two:

And speaking of mailboxes, have any of you priced them lately? I have and let me tell you what, I think I could convince my mail man to stand on my front porch and personally hold my mail in his hands every single day until I got home for less than some mailboxes cost. Geez Louise.

The light fixture is fine, and technically I don't think we're allowed to replace it without going through some historical preservation hoopla. So it stays.

The doorbell has been broken for about a year. One day it just stopped working. It's the old school bell, none of this new age chime stuff. The bell is in our kitchen next to the back door and we have no idea what caused it to quit ringing. Paul's going to take a look soon. When he does and he figures out how to fix it, because he's Superman and all, I'm going to have him replace the button with this one:

We have two large ceramic planters that are a good mixture of the blue and green that we selected for the house and have that paint drip effect going on that are currently on the two brick ledges that protrude from the house. We'll put those back out and I'm going to save up for a super tall planter to go in the corner to the left of the front door. We're talking like hip height tall.

The furniture and swing on the porch will get a good wash down, the white should pop off the brown/gray and the cushions/pillows will be tweaked (possibly) when we get done.

Things are buzzing around our block.