The Perfect Greige

Item number one on our summer "to do" list- painting our house and garage.  While we have a small, perfectly rectangular house, it didn't take us very long to decide that we'd be hiring someone "to do" this job for us.  With John's new job and a 3 month old baby there is very little free time to be had.  The job would have taken us months!

The painters were scheduled to start in mid-July but, much to our surprise, they called late last week and said they were running ahead of schedule and could start on Monday!  My excitement quickly turned to panic when I realized that this meant we'd only have the weekend to choose our colors.  (John panicked because that meant he only had the weekend to take down all the window boxes, windows, and other various things that were attached to our house).  I spent the better part of Saturday (in between feeding, pumping, changing diapers, etc...) poring over the deck of thousands of colors.  Then, I discovered an amazing tool that brought my obsession to a new level.  The Sherwin Williams color visualizer.  It allows you to upload a picture of your house and then, with the click of the mouse, you can see what different color schemes would look like.  How cool is that!!

I knew I wanted a blue door and John was set on white trim, so that just left the main wall color...  I thought that it made sense to choose the door color first and then pick coordinating neutrals for the rest of the house.  John thought that this was a crazy idea, he wanted to choose the house color and paint the door later.  (We tend to have opposing view points on all things house related).  After much debate, I gave in realized that John was probably right and we were able to narrow down our choices to three- grey area, the perfect greige, and ramie.  (All, of which, I think will match whichever shade of blue we decide on).

Meet the contenders:

Grey Area

The Perfect Greige

 

Ramie

Today, the painters painted an area of each on three sides of our house and the garage.  We had been almost completely set on "the perfect greige," but it turns out it's not-so-perfect (at least not on our house).  It is our least favorite of the three because it seems to have a pinkish hue, which isn't the look we're going for (plus it clashes with our roof).  My neurotic side wanted to see a few of the colors we ruled out since they look totally different on the house than on a little 2 inch sample or on a computer screen...  Ugh!  However, John pointed out that since we both liked ramie the best, we should just go with that.  Why does he always have to make things so simple?!  Fortunately, I was able to recognize this as a great decision and decided against arguing about it, even though I got less that 5 hours of sleep last night.  Usually, that would be a recipe for disaster!  Maybe motherhood is making me wiser (or just too tired to fight).

After hours of playing around with the visualizer, I also decided to paint the window boxes brown.

Meet our potential colors:

Ramie (main house color)

Turkish Coffee (window boxes)

Drizzle (front door)

Hmmmm...  that scheme looks really familiar.  It totally reminds me of the colors we have going on in our living room.  At least my taste is consistent!  I think it has a warm and cozy (and slightly modern) vibe, but what do I know.  Nevertheless, I'm really excited to see the finished product.  Hopefully, it won't take us too long to find time to paint the window boxes and put them back up.  I'm so excited to finally plant in them- now I just need to figure out what kind of flowers will go best with our new color scheme (too bad there isn't a "visualizer" for that!  Maybe I should invent it...).

Finally, on a more serious note, we found out that there is lead in our current exterior paint.  I guess this shouldn't be a surprise being that our house was built in 1952, but it was something that we hadn't thought about.  Thankfully, the company that we went with is certified and trained in how to deal with it and also gave us a bunch of guidelines to follow so that we don't get any particles in our house.  (Unfortunately, this will increase the cost of the job).  I, of course, had to google "lead paint and babies" and totally freaked myself out, but they assured us that there will be no harm done.  Had we decided to do the job ourselves, we probably wouldn't have known about the lead- this could have been very dangerous for little Jackson!  Thank God we're lazy!

Stay tuned for before and after pictures...