Exterior House Paint - "Well, it's green"

As part of our house remodel we wanted to get the exterior painted since we had never had any painting done since we first bought the house more than 18 years ago. In case you're wondering, that's about 8 years too long in a good situation, and we had a couple of spots that could have used it sooner. Never the less, I made sure that we budgeted to have the house painted.

In case you're wondering, here's what it looked like before in late afternoon (sunset)

Apparently the CC&R's for our neighborhood initially stated, in the early 70's, that all houses had to be painted "natural earth tones." I'd say this tan and brown is pretty earthy.

We looked for inspiration by driving through neighborhoods and eventually found this beautiful house in the Willow Glen area and started from there.

We wanted to be sure that we had picked the right color and bought some samples to put on the house and looked at them in various lighting conditions. (picture also seen last week as part of the paint prep)

It seemed to us that the "J" sample, Jungle Chameleon, most closely matched the house shown above, so we were certain we wanted that for the body, but instead of sticking with the creme color for the trim, we went with the slightly darker "Scallion" paint. This may have not been the best choice, but we're still getting used to it.

In this daylight view, the green of the trim and the green of the body are almost indistinguishable. We kept the garage door white and the vinyl trim of the windows is also white. Maybe we should have gone with the creme/white for the trim. After finishing the work the contractor came up to me and simply said "I am just going to say that you need to add some color, it's hard to see where the yard ends and the house begins." We are going to heed his advice and get some color going in the front yard now.

In these backyard views, you can see that it's not so extreme, and in fact looks quite nice.

In addition to painting the house, the contractor sealed the cut wood of the awning with a reddish sealer that was applied to all cut surfaces and we kept the original "pressure treating" reddish look. The color is pretty much the same.

Now all that's left to do on the house is clear out the living room and have the "popcorn" ceiling removed, resurfaced and the living room painted. We're going to spend a little more time planning the paint and get some good advice before we make that decision.

One last before and after set: