Painting, painting, painting . . .

Last year, when we had the siding and windows done on the front of the house, we discovered that the house had originally been clad in blue board-and-batten siding.  Being the historian and historic preservation advocate I am, I decided that we would redo the trim in the original house color - we had already ordered our fiber cement siding in white so it was too late to go back in that regard.

I painted the window trim last year before our contractor installed the siding but the rest of the trim remained in the old baby blue it had been when we bought the house.  Fast forward nearly one year later and the house was still a mix of the new blue (slate blue) and the old blue (baby blue).  With cold weather starting to approach, Jeff and I decided it was time to tackle the trim.  Hoy.  We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Naively we though the trim would be fairly straightforward.  Well it was, kind of, but in some regards in was a royal pain in the patootie.  The two biggest hassles were the carport and the soffits.  The carport has two roofs on it.  It was originally flat roofed but at some point, a gabled roof was added. Two roofs means twice as much trim.  Oy.  The soffits were also a pain because they're closed in - most of the houses I've lived in have open soffits where you can see the rafter beams.  Most people leave them be in  a mostly unfinished way.  Ours are extra wide and are closed in.  That equals a ton of painting.  We also had to paint the back wall in the carport.  The guy at the paint shop assured me that 1 gallon of paint would suffice for the whole house.  Boy was he wrong.  As of today, we've painted just over half the house and we've used nearly two gallons of paint.

Oh and on the topic of paint.  Last year, I had the paint store match the old blue from the original siding.  They did the best they could with the tiny paint chip I gave them but the new paint is a little greyer than the original.  To make matters worse, when Jeff went back to get more of the paint this weekend, Ace didn't have the correct dyes to match the paint they made for us last year, so they color matched the paint I had mixed last year.  Sigh.  Well, the second gallon of paint is a close match but it's more lavender than the one I got last year.  Luckily we were able to sequester the two colors so that they aren't right next to each other anywhere on the house.  The difference in the two is subtle but there's a big enough difference that they can't be side-by-side.

Here are the results of our labors (I'm guessing we spent at least 12 hours on the front of the house):

Before

What this picture doesn't show is how scruffy and faded the old trim was starting to look.

After

The darker blue trim looks subtle from the street but it makes the white really stand out.

Before

After. 

 I decided the paint the storm door to match.  I think it gives it a little pizzazz.

Before

After

The color change looks subtle here but you can see how much nicer the new siding looks.

We still have all of the back of the house to do.  Plus half of one side and all of the south side. Hopefully the weather holds for a little bit longer so we can do that next weekend.