Daredevil & Mink

One of the things that has held us back from painting the house all these years has been a general lack of direction on house colours. To be perfectly honest, I've always seen the house as a buttery yellow with a nice crisp red door. Miss P agreed with me on this, but Martin has had some reservations about that scheme, not the least of which being a rather uncharacteristic distaste for the red door (Martin is generally entirely partial to the colour red). His rather un-Martin like red avoidance in this instance has to do with the fact that a lot of houses in our neighbourhood have red doors. They all look great, but Martin likes to do everything just a little bit differently. At one point I suggested painting the  house a mocha-y brown with a hot pink door and front stairs, but that idea never got much traction. We kept coming back to the yellow scheme, which really I think would have looked rather cute on our little dwelling, and then just a few days after we decided we were really going to take the plunge and hire someone, our neihbours just down the street painted their house that exact same colour scheme. Given Martin's penchant for originality, that was the end of the yellow house.

Our friend Inga has suggested that since the house is such a distinctive colour of green, and being as how it's on a corner and is almost surely used as a bit of a local landmark, along the lines of "You know, that green house? The one on the corner? Well turn left there...". We can tell that the house has always been green, so Inga had suggested that we just update the green house, otherwise people will just always refer to it as "the house on the corner... you know, the one that used to be green", which is almost certainly true. Unfortunately, we've experienced more tears and frustration over the selection and application of green paint in our house than I care to relive and so we're a bit gunshy when it comes to green paint. That and the lovely folks at the other end of the block just painted their house the colour of green we would likely have gone for (damn keeping up with the neighbours I tell ya). And so it is that we've decided to go with a rather uncharacteristic and admittedly somewhat neutral colour scheme, using a brownish grey (Sherwin William's "Mink") as the primary siding colour and an offwhite trim. The exciting part? The door will be orange (Sherwin Williams Daredevil), and possibly the stairs too. The idea being that every few years or so, we can change the look of the house by changing the door. This may mean that I get my hot pink door someday, or possibly lime green... We'll see. So far, we're still in the phase where there's more paint removed from our house each day when we get home, so we're still a few days away from seeing the first coat.

Comments

[Jennifer]

We're trying to figure out house colors, too! It's quite a task! Luckily, the only house we look like is next door, and is black and white.

[Mena]

An orange door... I love it!

[anotheryarn]

Ohh, it sounds lovely. I can't wait to see it.

[meredith]

ooh, great idea with the grey! it's like buying a neutral sofa and chaning out the cushions ;)

are you painting the windows and the trim the same color?

[Annemarie]

Well, our neighbors just painted their house lime green with purple trim and a white door, speaking of houses that will become reference points.

The house next to it is burnt orange with a dark bluey purple trim, so it's quite the colourful block.

We're just about to paint ours "gentleman's gray" with "cod white" and "trout grey" - but we're a strata - try getting three different ppl to agree on a colour scheme. We have, at long last, moved one holdout away from "royal bank blue".