True Colors

While 2010 was the year of the backyard and 2011 is undoubtedly year of the kitchen, we hope for 2012 to be year of outside, beginning with repainting the house. Shortly after we moved in we started talking about color schemes for the house. The current exterior paint was applied pretty recently, but is very dreary colors and was applied without sanding the peeling paint below - big fail on their parts!



So shortly after we moved in, we started choosing our future paint colors. We started with these colors - a nice dark blue with clean white trim.



Then, when it was time to refinish our front door we painted it orange, adding it to the mix. So then, our colors looked like this.



Often on old houses, painters will choose one level of trim to add an accent color, so that the trim isn't all white. We really like this added color, so we added tan for highlights around trim areas, bringing our color scheme to this.



Then this summer we requested from the city a photo of our house in 1940, and saw how amazing it used to look with shutters. We decided that when we paint we want to build board and batten style shutters and paint them black. So then our colors looked like this.



Finally, in one of the blogs I follow I read a history of houses in the South, particular around New Orleans, that paint their porch ceilings light blue. There were many reasons attributed to this - one was that it kept ghosts away, another that it repels spiders. Regardless of the potential merit of these tales, I love the history and the quirk. So, we added light blue bringing us to these colors.



It may seem like a lot of colors, but most will be in small quantities to compliment the dominant dark blue. Plus, we figure it's an old house so we can get away with it, right?



Here's a perk of having a graphic designer for a spouse - a mock-up of our plan!



We can't wait to make this huge improvement to the house. In the meantime, I keep my paperclipped color scheme in the kitchen window so that I can look at it and smile when I need to be reminded - it's coming!