adourn: exterior colors

i mentioned in the last post that i was narrowing down the exterior colors for the house....exterior colors are so much more difficult than interior colors! they change drastically throughout the day. we're going with sherwin williams for our exterior paint and so i started choosing colors from their palette....i'm not very familiar with their colors, so i ended up putting 12 swatches on the house. and in the end, decided none of them were quite right. i gravitate towards benjamin moore colors and am quite familiar with their palettes...so i chose 3 of those and had them color match. in my head the whole time, i wanted a greyed out, but vibrant shade of blue/green for the main part of the exterior. there are so many lovely colors....but alot of them look very different on the exterior. i'm really excited that i'm able to do a more colorful scheme, seeing its a victorian house. but getting that main color JUST right is the most important. and then build the accent colors around that.

here are some of the swatches that i put up.... i really liked all 3 of these, but they were a little too blue for what i had in mind..not enough green in them.

and i don't know where the hell these colors came from....this is what i say, when they look SO different on the swatch card, than they do up on the siding! we're talking BRIGHT! but these have more green in them, like i originally wanted. but still not right.

and here are my benjamin moore colors that i chose as the last 3 swatches. and i love all of these, but decided to go with the viscaya. it has the perfect amount of blue and green and grey. it'll be a beautiful blanket of color to add accent colors to!

do you see how rough this siding is?!?! goal is to start pressure washing (very carefully) this coming week and then start scraping whats left of the paint and then start priming. sherwin williams has this great product in primer that hides a little bit of the 'alligatoring' and chipping of the paint thats left on the siding. i've been using it inside on the trim as well. its called peel-bond. its supposed to keep old paint from chipping off and the new paint to adhere strongly to the old paint. theres just no way of getting all of the old paint off the trim or the siding. so we need to have a strong base for the paint to stick to. its almost like a glue consistency and is sort of an opaque white-ish color. so needless to say, the primer on the exterior will have to be hand brushed on. its way to thick to go through a sprayer. we'd love to just replace the siding with new...but its not in our budget for a while. so with repairing, prepping and painting the existing...we're hoping it'll last a few more years until we can replace it. but i guess anything will look better than it is now, right?!?!

here are the accent colors i've chosen...this summer though, i won't have time to do all of the detail painting. that'll have to wait until next summer. so basically right now the house will be the main color and i'll paint all of the trim and detail just one color, until i have more time to add the other 4 colors.