THE PAINT CHIP BEAST

This commercial came on TV today and B told me that my paint chip hoarding tendencies would unleash the Paint Chip Beast upon us!  Yikes!  I wouldn't say I'm normally paralyzed by color choices though.... just for front doors!

PART TWO OF HOUSE PAINTING: The door color saga

So as I posted about last time, I've been painting my house and generally revamping the exterior.  We just got back from a (much needed) vacation, so in the time before we left, it was quite a push to get as much done as possible.  We got the shutters built and stained (tutorial to come later), most of the body of the house painted, and the front door painted.  I had done a Photoshop mock-up to see how everything would look together....

Photoshop mock-up

The quality isn't great, but you get the idea.  The Robin's Egg Blue door looked great with the ashen, cooler-toned wood on the shutters.  HOWEVER, when we went to pick stain, that wasn't quite what we ended up with.  There were some great options in transparent stain, but we couldn't get those in a tester size.  So we decided to go with a semi-transparent color instead.  None of the options were great, but we decided on Cedar Naturaltone.  It looked super orange when we put it on a test board, but when we held it up to the house, it looked great.  So, I proceeded to stain all 6 shutters in the Cedar Naturaltone.  We hung them on the house and I also painted the front door in the the blue color.  Then... I was working in the yard one morning and I saw the shutters in full shade for the first time and freaked out.  They were bright orange.  And they really didn't look good (to me) with the blue door.  Everyone else thought I was crazy, but it was bugging the crap out of me.

A quick photo that we took of the blue door.  Not awful, but not great.

PART ONE OF HOUSE PAINTING: it's spring and my house's birthday, time to paint....

It's spring (and has been for awhile, I'm kind of behind, I guess)! Spring and Easter are associated with new beginnings and I've recently taken a leap of faith and I quit my awful job.  If all goes as planned, I'll have a job waiting for me when we get back from vacation in May, but for now, I have a few weeks of downtime to work on the Etsy shop, blog, and my house.  

Bizarrely, we've had beautiful weather for the past two months, which almost made me forget that we live in Florida.  It actually felt like real spring for a little while.  We were able to take advantage of a few oddly cool days to paint the house.  (The nice weather is all over though... it's 95 today! Ugh.)

I've been wanting to paint the house forever and with time off from work right now, no time like the present, I guess. The exterior of the house is kind of like the kitchen, in that beyond basic repairs, it's been put off at the expense of everything else.  Last week was my house's "birthday"-- it's been two years since I closed!  I'm celebrating by giving the house a new look.  When I bought it, the house was all contractor white.  It was obvious that they just sprayed it all down in the white.  I hated it and it got dirty so easily.  

I went back and forth for months on what color to paint the house.  I wanted green for awhile, but decided that would blend in too much with all the foliage surrounding my house.  So, of course, I took to Pinterest to attempt to figure out what I wanted instead.  

Some of the pictures I pinned...

via kbhome.com