Color Catastrophe

Well, I haven't been posting for a while because I have been repainting the exterior trim work/molding on our house.

After living in our house for over a year, we just couldn't stomach the dark pink color that the previous owner had loved (in addition to the pink trim, she had painted the interior walls pink and had the kitchen done up in two shades of pink) so we decided to bite the bullet and finish this project before the end of the summer.

My wife, picked out a really cool color palette consisting of three colors; a very light cream blue for the soffits and columns supporting our front stoop, a middle hue gray-blue for the window trim and crown moldings, and then a dark blackish blue for the surface of the stoop steps. The three colors looked very cool on the color swatch thingy and we were very excited to put brush to wood.

So, after spending all last week power washing, sanding, taping and other prep work we got to work painting on Saturday morning. We decided to start with the lightest color and then add the other colors as we worked. After the entire day of painting, we completed the painting all the soffit, columns and some of the moldings on the front of the house by about 9 pm Saturday night. We packed up our gear and went in for the night.

Sunday, we rose early again and headed outside to work. My wife, as I was starting to paint the trim work around the molding asked in a way that could only be a statement rather than a question, "What do you think of the color?"

I took a step back and looked at the house. Agreeing with the doubtful tone of her question I answered, "I don't like it."

Crap.

While the color combination looked good on the color swatches, it just didn't work with the existing color of our siding or the color of the roof. It was too blue for a color palette that should have stayed in the browns. We stood for a couple minutes looking at the house, moving into the street to get a better vantage point, and then coming back in close to reexamine all the while trying to convince ourselves that the colors would work out.

"I was having doubts yesterday when you started painting the soffits. I should have said something." She finally confided to me.

I agreed but there was nothing that we could do about it. We decided that it was simply best just to start over. So, back to Lowe's we went, to pick new colors that would work better on the house we had rather than some house we wished we had. It took a while, there was a lot of comparing this color to that, of buying quart cans of various colors and trying them on the walls (we should have done the first time) and then finally settling on brown and green palette. However, by the time we started painting again, Sunday afternoon was all but gone. By the end of the weekend we were basically in the same position where we had started on Saturday morning. Two days wasted.

Thus, my plan this week was to paint everyday after work and hopefully I'll have the front done by this weekend and then I can move to the back and sides next week. Unfortunately, it has clouded up and it looks as though it might rain, so painting might be delayed yet again. It seems, as my wife commented this morning, "our house is never going to get painted." I'm starting to share her fear.