Color me impressed

This blog is ostensibly about a house, and yet that house hasn’t been featured very prominently yet.  That’s all about to change because we signed a contract to have the place painted last night.  We’re spending a small fortune to have it done, for a number of reasons.  The paint’s in bad shape, for starters.  We’ve got the full spectrum of paint problems: peeling, cracking and alligatoring are all well represented.  In some places, the layers of paint are too thick and they’ll eventually have to come off altogether.  And, of course, there’s lead.  If we assume the house has been painted every 10 or 15 years on average, there are somewhere between 15 and 25 layers of paint on the siding.  All but the last 3-5 are likely to have lead in them.  Our painter will be taking the requisite precautions to deal with this: spreading plastic around the perimeter of the house, wet scraping, sanding with HEPA vacuums and requiring the workers to be in suits and respirators.

Once the house is prepped and washed, we’ll be using the Cadillac of primers: XIM Peel Bond, a product I used on my last house.  It’s like painting with Elmer’s glue, but creates a super-pliable, breathable base for the paint layers that follow.  It also builds heavily, helping to smooth the wall surface and bond the remaining paint to the wall.  It worked wonders on my last house, but this job will be a true test of its effectiveness. The two top coats will be Sherwin Williams SuperPaint.  I used the SW Duration line previously, but our contractor warned us that it has a tendency to aggressively shrink as it dries, pulling old paint right off the walls.

But, I bore you with technicalities.  What you really want are color selections, right?  Well, without further delay, here are the three final selections for the siding:

This turned out to be an advertisement for why you should ALWAYS get real live samples on the walls for this kind of paint job.  The camo-green on the right was supposed to be a whole lot browner and the supposed “slate” blue in the middle went a lot lavender on us.  Fortunately, Weezie and I both love the third color on the left which is called “Link Gray“.  It’s a dark greeny-gray chameleon color that changes throughout the day based on the light hitting it.

I’ve told several people that I’m bored of non-committal architect colors.  The houses that make you stop and say, “Holy cannoli, look at the paint job on that house!” are not painted timid tan.

This time, I’m going bold and I have a feeling it’s going to turn out to be a great decision.