What color to paint my house?

[Zero102]

Sorry to start a second thread, but this is separate from the lawn issue.

To try to bring up curb appeal and scrounge up some viewings on our house we are planning to re-paint it. Right now it is kind of a ugly shade of green, and the paint on the house is peeling all over and on one side it has pretty much turned to white dust.

We spoke to our realtor briefly about this and he said that "anything is better than how it is now", but my wife and I can't really decide what color would be best. The siding material is old wooden boards, and they are structurally very sound (no rot at all). We have access to a large paint sprayer and ladders and will be doing the work ourselves, but again, we are having a hard time picking what color.

What do you guys think?

Here is a picture of the house (from when we moved in 4 years ago):
http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3405/1001360y.jpg

[Bizzareo]

"anything is better than how it is now" is true..

IMO i would redo the roof also, in that pic the shingles are starting to peel. Concrete roof + paint and it could look modernish?

Maybe that paint on rock/stucco stuff?


How does the flower bed and lawn look now?

Maybe its better to rent the house out?

[whiskas]

Barn red.

[Zero102]

I was thinking that white with black trim around the windows would look good. Unfortunately my photoshop skills are the suck, I have spent 30 minutes trying to put together a couple pictures to show my ideas but they just keep coming out all fucked up.

I figured either white or light grey would look good, but that also may make it look a bit dated. I was hoping somebody on here had a better idea (no, barn red is not a better idea).

[AndyL]

Flourescent pink :)

White with hunter green trim is a good default...

[Kloubek]

I would not worry too much about the house looking "dated". I mean, it is an old house... perhaps that is part of the charm?

I also would not paint it white. Or even a very light grey. While it appears the area is a little dark, it isn't like you need to keep the colours really light for the house to avoid getting dark and haunted-looking.

If it was my house, I would go with a gravelly-taupe colour. Something like this:

http://www.invitationsbylarissa.com/pics/Paper/Gravel.png (Maybe *slightly* more grey than this.

Then, if you really want white, paint the trim white.

[Zero102]

Kloubek, thanks for a serious and useful answer :)

I hadn't really thought about that color since the front room and hallway are painted a similar color, but you are right, when I play around with it it does look rather good.

Also worth mentioning, we will be replacing the front and back doors with ones that have decorative glass inserts to try to bring more light into the house and bring up the appearance a bit as well, so that steel door will be going, and we are doing a small stone patio under the pine tree on the right side of the picture.

[JordanLotoski]

Dark grey with natural cedar accents, do come sort of modern blob cedar shrubs out front, say 3-5 along with black mulch

[gram]

Just a head's up for the front door (might save you some money) You can actually go to Rona and buy a glass insert and leave the current door. It takes about an hour to cut the door properly for it but it looks 10 millions times better than a steel door and won't cost you an arm and a leg.

I would also do what Jordan said, get some really dark black loam in there and some cedars, go with his paint suggestion, would fit this house perfectly.

[Kloubek]

Originally posted by JordanLotoski
Dark grey with natural cedar accents, do come sort of modern blob cedar shrubs out front, say 3-5 along with black mulch

Dark grey with cedar is VERY attractive. Nice suggestion - though I wonder if it would look as good on such a traditional-looking house as it would on, say, a new build...

[JordanLotoski]

Originally posted by Kloubek


Dark grey with cedar is VERY attractive. Nice suggestion - though I wonder if it would look as good on such a traditional-looking house as it would on, say, a new build...

It looks good. You could Also do the same but with a navy blue, would tie in nice with the white windows and eves troughs.

[modpod77]

I'm thinking of some white and purple, like the roof for windows :D
It will be really lovely :D

[Tomaz]

Originally posted by Zero102
Also worth mentioning, we will be replacing the front and back doors with ones that have decorative glass inserts to try to bring more light into the house and bring up the appearance a bit as well, so that steel door will be going, and we are doing a small stone patio under the pine tree on the right side of the picture.


So, you are replacing the doors eh?

shameless plug *cough cough* PM *Cough


I really like Jordan's colour suggestions. In fact, he took the words right out of my mouth!I had other suggestions, but that is the best so far.

[Masked Bandit]

Lots of good answers in here. There should be a Beyond Landscaping Inc outfit.

Since you are sprucing it up for resale, as boring as it sounds, beige. I think you want to stay fairly neutral so you don't alienate any potential buyers. But your realtor was right, a fresh coat of anything goes a long way.

[masoncgy]

It's a small house, I would go with a lighter tone for the horizontal siding boards, a medium shade on those shakes in the gable ends and dark trim accents around the windows & doors.

I like the suggestion about the dark colors, but this is a small house, so bold colors will shrink the dimensions and it will appear to be smaller in size from the curb.

You have dark grey shingles, so stick with something that compliments it. Nothing worse than a nicely painted house that clashes with the shingles.

Kloubek offers a nice sample... a 'griege' as it's called. Very modern, clean & works with just about everything. You could do a charcoal in the gable ends and black trim... that would be very sharp.

[masoncgy]

Beauti-Rock that front step if you have a spare $50 and an hour... it makes a big difference too.

[Zero102]

Originally posted by JordanLotoski


It looks good. You could Also do the same but with a navy blue, would tie in nice with the white windows and eves troughs.

Do you mean replacing the cedar with navy blue or replacing the dark grey?

Cutting out and replacing the boards around all the windows to get ones that are just bare cedar may be a bit beyond the time that we have available so I don't know for sure that we can do that, but if you mean dark grey and navy blue then that is something we can do since it is just painting.

[JordanLotoski]

I mean the main body of the house could ne navy blue (with a subtle gey tone) do a few cedar accents, of of you really wanted to make it look great head down to IXL stone and get some cultured stone to accent the front.

May also want to look at building a nice cedar deck to stretch accross the front of the house (lweft of the door)

Curious what area is this home?

[Zero102]

I don't know about a deck on the front, the shape and configuration of the yard doesn't really allow for it. I will find a better picture of the rest of the yard and post that to show. That said, there is basically a little landing on the back and we were planning to rip it off and replace it with a small low deck, something big enough for a table and a BBQ under the walnut tree (there is a ~50 year old walnut tree in the back, 30-40 feet high and almost 50 feet across).

The house is located in Vernon, BC.

*EDIT*

To give you a better idea about what I meant for the deck on the front, here are a couple more pics.

From inside the house looking out (from the window on the right of the first pic)
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/3662/1001300i.jpg

Then, from the street looking back
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/5066/1001267b.jpg

[InRich]

I can coordinate the colour for you and paint it for you professionally, for a few thousand dollars...

i would be making it brown, or biege. let me know if your interested in a quote.

nevermind its in BC. sorry

[Zero102]

Thought it'd be a good time to post an update (to this thread and my yard one, all combined in one post), for anybody who was curious:

Here is the house as it sat on Saturday:
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/452/20101023121219.jpg

We did the following:
Rototill and hydroseed the entire yard
Landscape the front yard: Raise the sections around both trees and surround them with 2 rows of landscaping ties
Box in both front planters with landscaping ties
Added ~1.5 cubic yards of gravel and landscaping fabric to the larger of the 2 raised areas to give somewhere to put chairs and for the spruce needles to go
Applied mulch around both trees and around all plants in both planters
Painted the house and the garage a more distinctive color
Knocked down the 4'x8' rotten-to-hell deck on the back of the house and replaced it with a 17'x10' low deck
Minor interior repairs including removal of a useless laundry sink and new flooring in the back rooms


From when we listed it until when we went out at the end of august, the house had 3 viewings. When we arrived out to clean the place up it was obvious why. The yard had no grass whatsoever left, it was all weeds, and they were all 3' and higher. There was a shoddy fence built to close in part of the yard for our tenant's dog, and there were piles of yard waste and garbage all over the front yard.

We ended up taking 7 truck loads of yard waste and garbage to the dump, and spending 11 days and ~$4k in material and hydroseeding to clean the place up. If we had not fixed the place up we were prepared to take any offers above $200k, and there were none of them.

After fixing the place up we found ourselves with over 20 viewings in 1 month, multiple offers and ended up closing for $219,500.

Time well spent :D

[Tomaz]

Congrats mate! Looks good too! :thumbsup:

[masoncgy]

Great color choices, suits that house well... turned out very nice.

Congrats on the sale!

[bubbley]

looks nice, what is the sq footage on that house out of curiousity?

[bball2]

Great job man, looks way nicer! :thumbsup:

[Zero102]

Originally posted by bubbley
looks nice, what is the sq footage on that house out of curiousity?

Square footage is (IIRC) 917. I could be off by a few because it depends who exactly you trust to give you the right number. I've never measured it myself :)

Thanks for the kind words. I was a little uncertain about the color choice initially, but we needed to do something to make the house stand out. While we were working on it every neighbor for 3-4 houses in each direction came over to thank us. They were all happy our tenant left and were very unhappy that our messy yard and unkept house were bringing down the look of the neighborhood.

That means a lot when you have 2 condemned houses within a block of you :eek:

I think the results speak for themselves. I wish we had evicted our tenant this spring and done the work then since the market was stronger and we would have more than made up anything we would have had to pay our tenant.