rosemary on the tv

For a few months now, Aaron and I have been tossing around the idea of painting the front of our house. The front porch and carport have wood siding, and the paint was beginning to strip and look rather shabby chic. Which isn’t the look we were going for ’round these parts.

So we knew we needed to scrape the old stuff off and prime and paint it. But we got to thinking, what if we experimented and painted it something other than white? WHAT IF we painted it a nice shade of gray? We have a pretty charcoal roof, a yellow front door and dark red bricks. Gray could be nice, right? So I did this very bad mockup of what our house would look like with gray siding and black shutters (because if we went gray, the white shutters would look weird):

We thought it was an interesting an idea and one that, if we ended up hating it, wouldn’t be too terrible to fix. So, we decided to go for it! Two weekends ago, we got out there with our scraping tools and got to work.

Some of the spots were so bad, whole sections of paint would strip right off!

We scraped for hours, and after we scraped, we sanded.

And just as we were running out of daylight, the house looked like this:

Yikes. I’m sure the neighbors loved us. Because it stayed like that for a whole week. Our plan had been to prep everything on Saturday, and prime on Sunday. But it rained on Sunday. Then it continued to rain for a whole week. Finally, the NEXT Sunday, we got a pretty day, got up early and got to work. We used Valspar interior/exterior latex primer and we put it on thick. A few coats to cover the many imperfections in the wood. But hey, by sunset that day, things were looking pretty good!

Now, we’re crossing our fingers for nice weather this weekend because we’ve got three gallons of Sherwin-Williams paint in Summit Gray and a house to paint! I’ll update soon!