The Adored Abode

I have mentioned it before, but our we had our exterior painted late this summer. Yes, I have been holding out on you – a reveal is coming soon!

Before revealing the finished product I want to dive into how we decided on the exterior paint color scheme. There are many, many things to consider when selecting an exterior paint color. So much thought went into this decision! Selecting exterior paint colors felt like such a big thing to me because it would be a tad different to repaint the entire exterior (we did have it hired out) as compared to repainting a room inside if I decided I didn’t like the color. I am happy to report I love how our new paint turned out! Even better than I’d hoped. Below are the 6 main areas I would urge you to consider when thinking about what color you want to paint your house.

The pictures in this post are of our previous paint color!

1 – Look to Your Neighborhood (& HOA restrictions)

Most neighborhoods have a feel. Is your neighborhood mostly earth tones? Or are there a wide variety of colors? Along those lines, do you want your home to stick out? You may, as that is not always a bad thing if done well. It is also important to remember that many neighborhoods have HOA or historical paint color restrictions. Our neighborhood does have an HOA, but all the bylaws say are “stick to earth tones”. To me, that means neutral colors. So those were the types of colors we looked into.

We spent many hours walking around our neighborhood with our dogs (as we do anyway) really studying all of the homes and what color combinations people have. We were able to nix one idea we were originally into, a dark exterior. We love the look of a dark exterior, but after seeing a similar look on a house in our neighborhood that is fairly close in style to our home, a tudor style, we realized it was not what we wanted for ours! We love a dark exterior, and absolutely think we’ll do one someday, but just not for this house. This solidified we were going with a lighter body, with light to medium trim. We wanted to stay true to our house’s tudor style (i.e. darker contrasting trim on the battens), but in a fresh color scheme that we hadn’t seen around our neighborhood. We wanted it to fit in and adhere to our HOA guidelines, but we wanted something fresh that we hadn’t seen a lot.

2 – Think About Your House’s Architecture

Like I mentioned above, our house is a tudor style, built in 1980. From walking around our neighborhood and looking at similar styled houses to ours (there are a number of tudor styles in our neighborhood) we determined we liked the houses better that stuck with a more traditional “tudor” feel. There were a few houses we walked past that tried to modernize the tudor look and took it a bit too far and/or it wasn’t executed well, in my opinion. We knew we wanted to stick with a more traditional tudor style, by having a lighter body color and darker contrasting trim. Similar to our old paint color scheme, just lightened up quite a bit.

3 – Talk with a Colorist

The paint company we hired sent out a colorist to help select paint colors. I was not a huge fan of our colorist as she was pretty pushy and I didn’t end up going with any of the colors she suggested. I’m sure she loved that loved. But she did help me think through the undertones of colors and how they would look on our exterior, which is much different than how they would look on an interior room – direct sunlight can make colors look a lot brighter than inside! Colors I initially suggested she helped me see would be too bright for what we were wanting on our house.

4 – Consider Roof Color & Other Fixed Accents

When you are picking an exterior paint color you should think about any existing accents that will not be changing. In our case the roof, the stone fireplace on the front, and the color of the windows as ours are vinyl and we did not want to paint them.

Our roof is a black/gray, so we new it would play well with most neutral paint colors.

We have a stone fireplace on the front of our house that I LOVE. Our existing paint colors have cool blue undertones that I feel were not quite what I envisioned with our stone fireplace for the overall feel I want the exterior of our home to have. I would perfer the paint colors compliment the stone in a more muted way.

Lastly, our vinyl windows look white, but in reality they are more of an off white. This was important when choosing the body color for us since many windows didn’t have “trim paint” around them and therefore would touch the body color (spoiler, we went with a white body color!), but could also be a factor if you were painting your trim white instead and you have any windows that would have the trim color around them!

5 – Lots of Samples!

I cannot emphasis this enough. Get all the samples! Once your have a color range (or two) narrowed down get lots of samples. I started by painting samples (I did body, trim, and accent together) on poster boards and walked around the outside of our house for more hours than I’d care to admit to see which color combinations I liked together. In the end I think I got around 12 samples total (4 each for body, trim and accent). This really helped me figure out which colors I liked best together.

6 – Narrow it Down and Test Colors on Your House

Once you narrow it down to 1-2 color combinations I highly recommend actually painting the samples in inconspicuous areas around on the outside of your house. I did this and changed my mind on all of the colors. I ended up going with very similar colors to what I had thought I like based on the poster board, just slightly different undertones. I don’t think I would have been happy with the colors if I went with what I liked based solely on the poster board. The poster board was a helpful tool to pair color combos, but my favorite body and trim color on the poster board, I actually did not like on our house as much as I thought. Painting samples on your house may seem like an obvious thing to do, but both the colorist and the gentleman at the paint store specifically advised I should not do this. At first I didn’t do this, I am so glad I did.

These were the main things we considered when selected paint colors for our house. I am so happy this project is done! It has made such an impact on the overall feel of our house and the first impression you get when you see it.