Pick A New Siding Color, step by step

Duuude. We painted our house. Clarification: we painted a few compact test swatches. The creamy color was not exactly hurting our eyes, but there are a few vivid homes in our neighborhood with gray hardboard siding + brick and we enjoy the look, so we chose to give a few swatches a try. Having such a light creamy color on the hardboard siding (it is solid wood) and all of the trim is not doing the trim any favors (it is not popping at all since it is all the same color). And the pairing of the light cream with the darker richer brick is sort of jarring – like it is two houses. So we thought by going with a more mid-toned color (but not reddy-brown since that would be too much of a good brick thing) it might feel more cohesive. Like one unified house instead of a brick house with a big cream box in the middle.

First we held up around 25 swatches and picked three that we thought looked the best next to the brick (which has some fairly strong gray undertones – especially in the mortar). Then we got three two dolla (holla!) paint pots from Lowe’s and made three test squares (right above the brick part of the house so we can see how things look when they touch). Note: why yes I did wear my shirt inside out when painting them, thankyouverymuch.

The winner?

The guy on the right. You can see from the photo above that it is a warm taupey gray. So it shares a lot of undertones with the brick. We feel especially confident about how compatible it’ll be since it is nearly the same color as the mortar.

It is Flagstone by Martha Stewart, which we will get color matched to some sort of high quality exterior paint – hopefully with some built-in primer (more deets on that when we in fact pick up the paint and pin down what brand/type it’ll be). As for the one in the middle, that is Mushroom by Martha (which we thought was too dark), and the one on the left is Bedford Gray also by Martha (which we thought was too icy and blue).

Of course the photos are not the same as the real life effect, but we enjoy the guy on the right because it is not too icy/cool/light and it is not too dark. Do not get us wrong – we enjoy a dark house (with white trim that pops = remarkable) but we thought a mid-tone would look best with our black roof, existing brick, yellow door, and the bright white trim that we will be adding (black roof + dark gray house = too dark for our little ranch). So we hope our pick is a pleasant balance of not-too-dark-and-not-too-light (the roof can be the dark element and the white trim can be the light one). Here is a poorly photoshopped version of the last pic to give you an idea of where we are hopefully headed:

Speaking of the to-be-white trim, it is in fact truly out of order of us to test paint on the house because we still need to demo out the scallops on the porch and paint the trim (painting the hardboard and then demoing the scallops could lead to some paint damage that we’d then have to retouch). So although we have pinned down our paint winner, we hope to move on to scallop-demo and then we will get to painting the hardboard gray and the trim white (along with framing out the curvy columns to make them look chunky and square like our future scallop-less header).

Hope we can tackle that before it gets too cold for exterior painting (especially since we are also juggling the kitchen redo). Oh man, but cannot you simply picture our glad yellow door with white trim and gray hardboard with that gray-undertoned brick? Hope it is as lovely in real life as it is in my mind. If not… guess I will be repainting (we have gallons of the current colored house paint in the basement).

In the meantime, have you folks painted the trim or the siding of your house? Did you do the whole paint-a-few-test-swatches thing beforehand? Were you nervous? It is remarkable how not nervous I am. Typically I am indecisive and glad to wait a while while thinking things over, but this time I am all over it. Seriously, cannot wait. So here is hoping the colder weather + the kitchen do not make this a spring project. Come on fall, hold out for a while longer!