home building: thinking about exterior paint

Choosing paint colors (for the exterior and the interior) has been both one of the most enjoyable and one of the least enjoyable parts of this home building process.

At first, picking lovely paint colors was fun. That is, until I had to show them to my husband and come to some type of happy compromise. I personally have come to the conclusion that if I would just be left 100% in charge of all the color and decorating decisions, life would be so much easier (at least for me, ha ha!). And pssss - don't tell Troy, but my colors usually win out in the end anyway and he always loves them. So if we could skip the round about way of arriving at the conclusion that my colors look great and just go straight to the end, that would be great! Joking a little, but mostly serious. ;)

So back to paint. After much discussion on exterior color options, we finally agreed that shades of gray siding, bright white trim, and a colored door would be lovely.

But do you know how many shades and versions of gray there are?! More than enough to make the two of us go batty.

Here are only a few of the possible colors we were thinking of. Thank goodness Home Depot offers  samples that only cost $3. (Didn't get around to color correcting these pics in Photoshop. They were taken in shadow so the color isn't that accurate, but you get the idea).

We instantly ruled out the darkest and the lightest.

Then we narrowed it down to a medium dark gray (Martha Stewart Cement Gray from Home Depot in case you were wondering). We were thinking of paining it in the bottom board and batten wainscoting and then perhaps going a little lighter on the horizontal siding above the wainscoting. Shown here, we have the Cement Gray in both sections. (photos taken 9.27.11)

But then after talking with one of Troy's brothers (who is a drywaller and painter) about paint, he persuaded us to go with Sherwin-Williams or Columbia paint over Behr for many reasons. We decided to go with SW but they don't have the exact same colors Behr does and we didn't want to color match.

We just want to use colors right off of their paint chips so that in the future we will have an easier time maintaining and matching paint. Luckily it didn't take nearly as long choosing possible paint colors this time around. Colors aren't represented in this photo so great and look more brownish than they do in real life but you get the idea again. We are going to use two (or maybe all three - Mindful, Dorian, and Dovetail) of these grays and use the darker blue color (Drizzle) for the front door.

Hoping to paint next week!