EXTERIOR FACELIFT

When we bought our house, it was mostly because I fell in love with the interior. The exterior? Well, it was fine but it wasn't going to win any awards. For years we've been sprucing it up here and there. First we tried a rambling English style garden in the front that required hours weeding every weekend. Then we went for redwood bark. Then we added a tree. Then we added some lavender and grasses. And in the last couple of months we've pulled out the dying boxwoods, put up a new redwood gate, and have started to plan for landscaping. Throughout all of this work though there's been one thing that I've really hated that was quite the eyesore - the garish red paint that seems to have been on sale in the 80s as several hundred homes in Oakland have the exact same color.

Photo taken the day we took possession - July 2006

Aside from how much I hated this color there was never a real, viable reason to do anything about it - especially since we have limited time to work on projects and there were, and are, far more pressing concerns to take care of. Fast forward to this past autumn and we started to notice cracks in the cement around the pillars and where the railings meet the cement. Also, over the last year or so the paint has started to crack and peel off. In addition to being an ugly color, it now looks ghetto too. Alan's dad has worked with concrete before and having explained the situation to him, he explained to us what an easy fix it would be - just a couple of hours over the course of a couple of days. Really? Sign us - or rather, Alan - up. In addition to fixing the cracks we decided this would be the perfect time to paint the area as well. But what color?

I knew I wanted something in the gray family. I went online and found a couple of color swatches that looked promising and sent Alan off to the store to buy samples. What was on my screen looked vastly different than what came out of the jar. For instance, I'm convinced that Home Depot must have mixed one color incorrectly - there's no way I asked for something as light as it was showing up.

Almost immediately I knew which color I was leaning toward based on these two sample areas. After living with the samples for a couple of days, we decided that we were in agreement and painted a larger area to see if that would impact our decision any.

So, it looks like the winner is Evening Hush from Behr. It's definitely a steely gray with a blue undertone, which I think works well with our greige house and (unplanned) purple landscaping. You can see it used indoors in the master bedroom reveal at 4 Men | 1 Lady. The plan is to start painting this weekend and hopefully finish by end of day Sunday. We'll see if we get that far, but I have really high hopes for the impact this will have on the look of our home. If nothing else, it can't be worse than the brick red.