It’s time to paint the exterior of our current renovation house! The house is half siding and half brick, so I wanted to paint it no matter what, but we were forced into it after we bricked in the back patio door and a window and our mason couldn’t find a matching brick.

Since he couldn’t find an exact match, we asked him to just match the texture of the current brick so when painted, you’d never know there used to be a door and window there. Next, the tricky part! Deciding what color(s) to paint an entire house. I knew I wanted a traditional color not only because of the shape of the house, but also because it’s located in an older, established neighborhood.

To narrow it down, Mike’s Mom helped us render some options. She started by taking an actual picture of the house and removing all of the clutter (satellite dish, landscaping, window coverings).

Then she applied different colors, shutters, doors, etc. to it. Here are our first couple of renderings.

Seeing these confirmed what we already suspected; the house needed depth. We had her add a portico to the front porch. We also decided we wanted to add grids to the bow windows after seeing the difference between with and without.

Before we could paint, we needed to build the portico we decided to add. After we built it, we took another picture of the house and she was able to add the actual portico we built to the renderings. Now we were ready to pick a color.

In the end we went with super traditional white house with black shutters and a black front door. You can’t go wrong with that. We are going to add all new landscaping, a new stamped concrete walkway, and repave the driveway, so those things will help the overall aesthetic of the house too.

UPDATE: here’s the real life finished exterior of the house. This picture was taken in early Spring 2018 and the curb appeal will be even better when all of the landscaping blooms!