So Fresh and So Clean

I love our house.  I love it. I am so relieved! The day I knew the actual siding was getting painted I had butterflies in my stomach as soon as I entered the neighborhood because I was so nervous I would regret the color choice. We didn't even go crazy on the color! But when you're spending that much money and painting something that big that you have to live with for the next 15 years it feels like a monumental decision and I was nervous!

I won't keep you waiting!

It is the exact grey I wanted! Some greys go blue and some greys go brown. I wanted a true grey and I wanted it to be dark so our white trim popped but not so dark that our black shutters got lost in it.  I say I wanted because Derrick let me pick the color scheme. He did get called in and consulted on the specific grey we picked though. Spot on!!! Derrick and I are patting ourselves on the back and backing out of our driveway more slowly then normal so we can admire it!

And here is where we started:

 Improvement rating: 100000000000000006%.

The tan was fine. It was fiiiiiinnnnnneeeee. I never loved it but it fit well in our tan tan tan neighborhood. I am LOVING being the grey sheep of the neighborhood now though!

We ended up going with CertaPro painters. You've probably heard of them, they are a pretty big company. I was most impressed with their overall quote process and customer service and they were willing to match a lower quote I had received although their quote was still pretty competitive. They contract out painters so our project manager was Armin and he was great! Super communicative and he fixed a few spots I wanted him to re-touch without question.

We met with a color consultant provided by Certa Pro and together we picked out Pavestone Grey. It's the bottom one here. We got a few samples the next day and I immediately didn't like it on the house so it was between Acier and Dovetail which are both the original ones I had in mind.. Acier and Dovetail are on the same paint chip, one above the other. In the end Derrick and I went with our gut and chose Dovetail. You can see why it was so nerve wrecking though! We had to pick an entire house color based on these two boards and it was of course raining for a week straight so we couldn't see it in the sunlight first. This was under our covered front porch.

The painters started on Wednesday and just wrapped up last night around 6 PM. You can see in this picture without the shutters how much our original color had faded.

We had our windows taped off like this for two days so they wouldn't get paint on the glass. It was a little creepy inside not being able to see out at all. 

The two dark spots on our trim that started this whole thing were in fact wood rot. Armin dug out about four feet of rotted wood in each spot and I am very glad to have caught them early. They also found two other spots that needed to be replaced so hopefully we're good to go for a while!

I still need to order another "Hello" for our front door. They had to remove it to paint the door but I loved it so I'm bringing it back. 

This morning our yard finally got mowed too so we are looking so FRESH right now!!! Hope you love it too!!