Extreme Make-Over

So I've come to the point in the summer where I've convinced myself that we're ready to paint the house. This personally, has been one of the very first things I've wanted to do: our house is right on 26th street - a pretty busy street in town - and I hate that you can see the chipping paint and faded siding. Plus, being gray with green trim, it blends in with the trees a little too well - might as well have been camouflage.

Now that I've set the date in stone and have my heart set on giving the house a face lift, I'm kind of stumbling on what exactly we'll be painting this house!

Normally I shoot from the hip with colors, but I realize that I probably don't want to screw up the outside of the house - it's a little easier to paint your bathroom an ugly color and just keep the door closed. Since my house was build in the late 20s in a craftsman-bungalow style, I tried doing some research on what colors houses were generally painted. But, I decided those looked bad (lots of gray and greens, which makes sense, right?).

So now I'm looking online and seeing what strikes my fancy. Right now, I'm kind of leaning towards warmer colors since our lot is so shady I feel like a dark and dreary house blends in too much. I really like the dark trim with the red accents on this house (at right). It's not a bungalow-style, but it has similar woodwork treatments on the gables; I like how it draws your attention to the woodwork without looking too busy.

This other picture (below) I like because I think it looks warm and inviting; I also really like the red/rust accents. I have always wanted a big red front door: I'm not sure where it comes from, but I always felt like red doors were very welcoming on homes. Must be the influence of all those colonial-style houses I was around growing up ;)

For now, I guess I can still run though ideas since I have another week to make up my mind: the plan is to start Sunday and through the next week start tearing the siding off the south side of the garage and fix the gutter. Then power wash and scrape the whole exterior, as well as fill cracks, caulk windows and replace any rotting woodwork. Then we should be ready to paint.

And don't worry, right now the plan is to just paint the front, west and south side since we've got two windows on the east-side that need to be replaced. It's a little crazy, but I think if we can get this one BIG thing done, we can kind of kick back for some of summer and work on the little projects. Like trying to fix the dryer...