Exterior before and after

I don't think I ever posted any pictures of my before and after for the exterior of the house. I actually finished this last year mostly by myself. I did need help with the very top rafter tails, but everything else I hand sanded, primed and painted.

Before: A couple months after we bought our house. It was painted half cream/pink and the other half just bare ass wood. It doesn't look too bad here, but the sides were mostly bare wood. Scraping and sanding this off took me near 2 years to complete.

During: Here is the fron mostly sanded to complete bare wood. As you can see the original color of the house was green, so we decided to keep it green, but a lighter green.



After: Here is the house tonight. I just went outside and quickly took a picture while it was getting dark. The house is back to it's green and it took me the whole summer last year to completely painting it. As I said before I did have to pay some one to go up top and paint the rafter tails. The colors I used were Benjamin Moore Saybrook Sage for the house, Antique White for the trim and Bryant Gold for the trim. It's a little hard to see the gold but it's there.

Porch ceiling is now blue

Well over the weekend we decided to paint the porch ceiling. Up until Saturday it was a multicolored white, pink and ah natural. There was about 7 layers of paint on it and the previous painters surely didn't strip it all off. They actually just stripped bits and pieces of it along with the wood. But anywho we decided it was time to finally paint that sumumabitch. Lita had this great idea she got from a magazine, where someone painted their porch ceiling light blue, to go along with the color of the sky. So we thought it would look good on our ceiling as well, so off to the Home Depot we went. We "quickly" decided on a color, bought it and raced back home just drooling at our chance to paint.

But first we had to prime the damn thing, so we said what the hell it can't be that hard, right??? Were we wrong, unknown to us we didn't think that holding a paint roller off a long pole while looking straight up and dropping bits of paint in your eye would hurt so much. It took us about 2-3 hrs to prime and since it was getting cold here in Florida we called it a day. Let me tell you, I didn't know that you could hurt on some parts of your body. Even parts that weren't even directly related to painting muscles we hurting.

The next day Monday (Sunday was recovery day) we began painting. The weird thing about it was that it didn't take long at all this time. It seemed like it only took an hour to finish up the job and the after results were great. It was like we were looking into the sky, you know with like gouge marks here and there and thickly painted... paint. But we were still happy with the results, we do have some more touching up to do but that will have to wait until this cold weather dies down.

Here are some more pics:

This was the first swipe of paint, we had to see if our eyes had deceived us in Home Depot, but we were pleased.











Lita is working oh so hard to make it look good, she sure knows how to use that stick.











This is me riding the paint roller like an asian cowboy would, spanking the air behind himself. That's basically what I did all day. But the color does look good.

Exterior colors, version 2

Well I tried another set of colors, this time with different shades of the green and cream color. The green turned out a lot better and I am way happier with the results, but the cream turned into more of a yellowy color. I didn't really want yellow, since there are a few houses around that are yellow. I guess I will have to make another trip to the paint store and try another cream color. You know, I thought that doing the prep work for the exterior was hard, but picking colors will kill your brain. Anyways here are some pics of the new colors: