Exterior Colors.

This whole "let's do a bunch of work on the house and hire it out" is not going very fast. At. All. Our windows and doors have been ordered and our contractor is finishing up other jobs while waiting for that stuff to come in. Last night we picked out our exterior colors! Which is way more exciting that I thought, but also very anti-climatic.

I knew that I wanted something a little more bold. Let's face it, our house is U.G.L.Y. The exterior is one of about 4 reasons I didn't want to even look at the house. The color is gross and I didn't want to really deal with the type of siding (I.E. not maintenance free). Let's all be thankful that someone had painted it since its previous color, because that color probably glowed in the dark.

Our street is full of white and beige. Very uneventful. The year before we bought, a pretty nasty storm came through and most everyone with vinyl siding got new. It seems as though the wood stuff held up too well... So, most everyone is rocking fairly new siding, except us wood people, who just got paint jobs. The most interesting house is probably across the street with a nice medium blue and in second would be down a few from us with a light green.

My immediate, pre-sample thoughts were gray. A dark-ish gray. Gray is my go-to neutral right now. While I might be bordering on maybe having a little too much around the house, I'm 99% sure I won't get sick of it over time. My other thought about gray is that it goes with most any bold, bright color. That means that I can paint my front door a crazy color or my choice, get sick of it after a couple of years and paint it a new crazy color. I've got the first color in mind for our new door.

Looking through the siding colors, there were either very light grays or one dark gray. After going back and forth a little, because we weren't sure if the gray was reading brownish or it was just the lighting, we settled on that dark gray. Charcoal Smoke to be exact. As far as the trim, we're just going for a nice, bright white. We not replacing our gutters (they're new after that storm mentioned above), so we wanted the trim to not be too different than that. Plus, there is one house up the street that I probably like the best because of the contrast between the dark beige / maybe brown siding and the nice bright white trim.

And there you have it, a lot of words to just say that we picked dark gray and white. 

The samples didn't photograph very well, so hopefully you get the idea...