The Brick, Part II

Forever ago, or what seems like forever ago, I wrote about the changes that Patrick and I wanted to make to our soon-to-be new house. After the home-buying process discouraged me, I tried to take a break from planning renovation projects on a house that wasn't even mine yet.
Fast forward 5 months and one successful house purchase...
Its getting close to Spring and the warmer weather has us anxious to get to work outside. While there is still much to do on the inside, I think some work on the ol' curb appeal would be just the right thing to kick me back into renovation/decoration mode.

So here's what we're working with...



Patrick already mowed down the heavily over-grown monkey grass and I ripped up the scraggly bushes in the brick planter out front. All we need is a couple of hours with some heavy duty machinery to rip up the rest of the shrubbery and we'll be ready to paint!

There are 3 different types of siding on the house, which makes it look messy, so I would like to redo all of the siding to make it all the same. I'm not sure how much that will set us back, so we may end up painting over whats there just for a temporary fix. Eventually we will also get around to replacing the windows, but thats a whole lot of money that we're not quite ready to spend.

We know that we want to keep the front door and shutters black. I would like to repaint them to freshen them up a bit and would love to have a new front door. Preferable something like this one, with a nice shiny coat of black paint.

(Found similar ones here and here too, but I think I may be able to find one at a local salvage place.)

If you'll notice, in the far right of the top picture of the house, you can see our detached gargage peaking out. It was built much later than the house and is covered in vinyl siding. I would much prefer to leave the garage as is, so we're going to try to paint the house a color that complements the existing color on the garage. Here it is in all its glory. Patrick loves having his own space to store all of his tools, hunting gear, and other manly equiptment.

With swatchbook in hand, I went outside on a day with fair weather to try to match to color of the garage. I compared paint samples to the siding in both sun and shade until I was happy that I had found its match. Then I chose some colors that I thought may complement the color of the garage. Below is my color pallette. The first color is the closest to basic white that I could find in the Ben Moore virtual paint deck. The trim and gutters will remain white as they are now. Then of course, is basic black for the doors and shutters. The third color, Natural Cream, is the closest I came to matching the siding color. The rest are different options for painting the brick and siding on the house. As you can tell, we're sticking with a neutral color and I really like the grayish khaki colors. I'm hoping to pick up a few paint samples very soon so we can do few test patches on the house.

The weather is supposed to be lovely this weekend, so hopefully the hubs and I can get outside and get to work!