Seven Ten Clark

On with the story!

I should mention that we had actually tried a sample of the Menards paint in the color we chose. In fact, we had a lovely stripe of it next to the front door for months before we finally got around to prepping the house for painting, and while we agreed that it was a little on the bright side, we still felt it was close enough to what we had envisioned and wanted to use it for the whole house. I’m sure our neighbors loved us, having a white house with light blue trim and a big green stripe down the front.

The green that we originally chose gave off a bit of the color blue, but when we found the color closest to it at Home Depot, it was clearly more yellow. That should have been another clue. When Kevin finished up the front of the house, it GLOWED. Our poor neighbors must have thought we were crazy. A few of them walked by while it was this color and said things to the effect of, “Well…I guess it might be okay?” and then scurried away. Kevin and I were embarrassed, to be honest. It certainly hadn’t turned out the way we’d hoped.

I did a little bit of internet reading, and had the idea that we might be able to do some paint doctoring, like by pouring a darker color into it. Kevin decided to try asking Sherwin Williams if they might be able to do something about our situation, since we definitely didn’t want to go all the way up to Home Depot in Cedar Rapids for nothing. He was told they might, so we loaded up all 11 remaining gallons into the trunk of his car and drove over, hoping for a miracle.

We had a paint chip that we thought we’d like, and Sherwin Williams actually has a whole line of brochures that include paint chips from different architectural eras, and we found a color in the “Suburban Modern” brochure (i.e. 1950s) that was pretty close to the paint chip, and the gracious lady working the counter told us she would see what she could do.  She warned us that the color we had chosen to shift our paint to was still pretty bright, and we let her know that we wanted bright, just not, uh, neon. The next day, Kevin picked up the doctored paint and set about covering up the first coat. This was the result:

Perfect! It was exactly, EXACTLY what we’d had in mind. When he was repainting, the new color next to the first green looked almost diarrhea-brown, but now that it’s completely covered it up, we love it. The trim and mailbox will be white, along with the cinderblock foundation. We’ll also be replacing the front storm door (discussion on that will be saved for another post) and storm windows with white ones eventually. Better photos to come!

So, we had a bit of an issue with paint during the last week, causing us both a lot of frustration and probably raising the ire of our neighbors, those poor folks who probably never dreamed they’d have to deal with kooks like us when they chose their lovely little houses in our historic neighborhood. We’re sorry, neighbors, we didn’t do it on purpose.

I should probably begin at the beginning. As you’ve probably noticed when you’ve looked at pictures of the outside of the house, we had a bit of a problem with peeling paint.

Okay, maybe it a little more serious than “a bit of a problem”. Paint all over the house was peeling like crazy, all the way down to the bare wood. It had previously been painted less than 5 years before, and I guess it started peeling less than 6 months afterwards. I don’t know if the paint issues stemmed from poor workmanship, or if it was possibly because, during the years that he had lived there alone, Kevin’s dad had used inside climate control as little as possible, and extreme temperatures coupled with very, VERY poor insulation created issues with the siding and making the paint peel. Maybe it was both of these factors combined, I don’t know. Anyway, it was obviously something that needed to be dealt with, and soon. The homeowner’s insurance company had even started sending us letters telling us the paint needed to be fixed ASAP. (Of course, they started sending these letters to us in JANUARY, which is the perfect time of year for painting the outside of a house, right?)

Anyway, we planned to take care of it as soon as the weather got nice, and thanks to a generous joint birthday gift from my parents, we had the funds to buy some kickass paint. We decided on green, since it wasn’t a very common color on our street, and we both had a vague idea of what shade we wanted. When he was growing up, Kevin’s grandparents’ house was pretty close to what we wanted, bright but not too vivid, a good 50s color. Since then, it has been sided with vinyl in a neutral shade, so we spent a lot of time cruising around town, looking for the perfect flavor of green, and finally found a house that we thought looked like it was the right color. Then came the fumbling.

Instead of knocking on the door and asking the owners directly if they knew the paint color/brand, or at least getting a comparative color, instead we went to Menards, picked up all of the green paint chips, and then parked ourselves across the street and tried to eyeball it. Not too smart. We settled on their shade called “A Little Bit of Lime”. After translating that to a Home Depot/Behr color, it was “Key Lime”. Lime. That should have been a clue that it wasn’t quite right.

Not so bad, right? It looks pretty mellow as a paint chip. Too bad we picked it out in the store, mere minutes before we had 12 gallons of it mixed. If only we’d been able to visualize the shade on the exterior of a house…

AUGH! Yeah, not good. A little too…neon. So, what were we greeted with when Kevin was finished painting the front of the house?

To be continued…