When Katie and I first moved into our house in August of 2011 the exterior was looking a bit drab. Don’t get me wrong, we love white but this just made our house look pale. It lacked warmth, life, and any sort of personality.

Not only was there no color to compliment the old fashioned warmth of the red brick but the white paint was actually wearing thin. So thin in fact that the aluminum siding was showing right through. So Katie and I discussed how we would remedy the situation. We discussed it quite a bit, looked at pictures online, and drove around neighborhoods looking at their solutions. Turns out we both prefer the look of vinyl siding, thinner planks, and the overall permanence of them (meaning no need to paint and repaint) but when we looked into cost, quotes were coming in upwards of $15,000+… Uhm…. no thank you.

But vinyl does look nice doesn’t it?

Since residing was out of the question, the only other option was to paint. We called up our go-to painter guy and told him what we wanted to do. He came out and provided us with a very appealing and attainable estimate at $1,200. We grabbed a Sherwin Williams color swatch booklet and began the painful decision of choosing a color. It seems so easy in theory but I was second guessing myself left and right.

So with a couple options but no final decision, we put it off for a couple months. Then, with November rolling in and snow just around the corner, we decided it was time. We pulled the trigger on “Down Home.”

You know we’re huge fans of neutral tones (specifically whites/greys) so this was a little out of the ordinary but we really liked how it was a bold brown with a hint of red which we were hoping would play nicely alongside the red brick.

For those of you planning to paint, I’d recommend putting grabbing a sample mix and throwing a small coat somewhere on the house to get an idea of how it’ll look (just like on an interior wall). We didn’t do this (not really sure why not) so I was holding my breath the whole time.

The day before they came to paint I asked that they paint our trim white so that the house still had a brighter side too it. Unfortunately, this was going to run us an additional $600 but we knew it was the right decision.

Go figure I was on a business trip the day the came to paint so Katie watched as the color went up, texting me the whole time. Our painter was awesome and had the house coated in one day but the weather (getting colder) caused some dripping so at no additional cost they came back and repainted the whole house again.

The final product looked great. Much warmer with more life. But now we didn’t like the darkness of the windows. It’s a good thing those were the #1 thing on our replacement list.  This picture doesn’t do it justice. Almost makes our house look creepy. Trust me, the new windows make all the difference. — What do you think?