Final photo!

I've been waiting for a sunny day so I could take non-phone photos of the finished paint job. And then I wanted my before photos to show what it looked like when I actually bought it, arbor vitae in front and all. Guys, between the 30,000 photos (it's quantity, not quality!) I've taken and the two shows filmed here I think I have the best documented house in Portland.

And yet, I don't have a facing shot of the house with the arbor vitae, I guess because you couldn't really see the house behind them. So I have screen shots. I apologize.

I loved my inspector so much. Total sweetheart.

Can you believe I overbid on this crackden?

And then I tore out the arbor vitae with my friend David.

And then we had the rhododendrons removed and painted some swatches.

And now she looks like this!

Sunny day real estate

I'm really pleased with how the paint color picks up the bit of purple in the roof and in the bricks on the fireplace.

And I think it's going to look great with all of the plants (all the plants! all of them!) that I'm going to put in front.

On a stormy day. Still cheerful!

Even with the pink tree, LeAnn.

I love it, I don't care what anyone says. Pink + orange forever!

Bonus Offbeat Green because I'm in love with this scene!

The first coat of paint is up!

I would hug it but it's still wet.

Click to embiggen

Oh my god. I'm so excited. They still have to paint the doors Saucy Gold and repaint the trim. I'm not sure how I feel about the garage door being the same color as the body of the house. I know that's de rigueur right now, but it looks funny to me.

Just a reminder of the before:

Pale green awfulness

 Yay!

I think we have a color

House colors: I was leaning toward Peppercorn. Greg was too.

And then he told me that he thought it was too dark but he would go for it if I loved it. I want both of us to love it (and if it looks terrible I need someone to be complicit with me) so I thought about it a while. I mixed some white with the Peppercorn, since he liked the tonality of the color, just not the darkness of it, and put that up on the house. And he liked it! The resulting color actually looks like the picture above.

I swear the difference is more dramatic in person

Of course I didn't measure anything, just glugged some of the Summer White into the Peppercorn and threw it up on the house. I took it into Sherwin Williams and explained what I did. The dude scanned it into his computer and said, "Okay you're all set."

"What do you mean?"
"I scanned it in and we'll give the information to your contractor."
"No, I need you to mix up the paint. The computer is never right."
"Really?"
"Yes. Go mix it."

An hour and half later and 12 iterations and remixes and we had something close enough. I am so glad I am a pain in the ass because that scanned in color wasn't even close to correct. While one of the batches was mixing the two guys at the store started bad mouthing other paint stores and their computers and the fact that they are often too busy/too lazy to have a human look at the colors.

I very tactfully didn't point out that just 45 minutes prior they were going to send me on my way without ever even looking at the computer's color choice. I would like a medal for that.

So the final color choices are Peppercorn-light on the body of the house, Saucy Gold on the door, and Creamy for the trim. Thank you to everyone who chimed in with their opinions--this decision is a huge one and crowd sourcing it made me feel a lot more secure about it.

SWOON.

And soon I'm going to buy all the plants! All of them.