How a Professional Color Expert Coped with Exterior Paint Selection

Choosing paint color for other people’s houses is easy!

I didn’t even know that people will actually pay you to help them to choose colors for their house! It’s great! When you’re successful in finding that magical color that resonates with the home and decorating style, it is an incredible experience!

See my article, “My Disastrous Search for the Perfect Shade of Black Paint” for a paint color search that went badly!

Choosing color for my own home, though, really stresses me out. I have definitely taken some chances with color before, and not all of them have turned out like I wanted. It’s like, I can see the vision in my head, but it doesn’t translate well to reality.

That is exactly what I was afraid of!

When my husband tasked me with choosing the exterior paint for our house, I honestly had some jitters about the project. Our house has a significant visual footprint; it’s tall and wide, with some prominent architectural details. We also have three garage doors that face the street, as well as a wood front door that sheds dried particles of varnish every time the door closes. No pressure!

We started our color selection process by driving around our neighborhood. Every time we saw a stucco home, we pulled over and took note of what we liked, didn’t like, and what we thought they could do better. To my surprise, I found that our neighborhood has a number of stucco homes, although we have the only one on our street. Some of them look very nice, and some miss the mark. We realized that our color choice could make or break the appearance of our home.

As we narrowed our exterior paint color choice, I made note of how our house looks in the context of our neighbors’ homes. The houses on our street are close together. I knew that if we chose something that clashed with the next door neighbors’ houses, our house would look out of place. The faded yellow stucco (our house) looked mismatched next to the traditional brick home on one side, and the whitewashed gothic home on the other side. 

Narrowing my paint options

Have you ever selected paint colors before, or tried to? It’s not easy! Do you have any idea how many “neutral” colors are in the average fan deck? Neither do I, but trust me when I say that there are way more than fifty shades of gray…

It was critical that we narrow our paint color options.

My husband initially thought that he wanted the house to be painted gray. After seeing a few gray stucco homes, though, he quickly realized that “gray” is a tricky color. Every shade of gray has an undertone, and the undertones appear differently depending on shadows and light. We have a “sunny” side of the house (the back), and a “shadowy” side of the house (the front, most of the day). Therefore, we needed a color that looked good in both conditions.

Besides that, we have a number of cloudy days to account for, and that also changes the way that colors appear.

After seeing a few tan houses, we ruled out that option. We didn’t want our house to have yellow-toned paint again, because it looked out of place; most of the houses are brick on our street. Dark colors were out (too gloomy), same with pastels (traditional neighborhood).

Beige was looking like the best option for us

So, similar to gray, beige comes in an almost unlimited array of shades. I took my fan decks outside, spread out the paint strips, and studied them like they were a final exam. After much deliberation, I chose a few that I liked based on the sample chips, and ordered large samples from samplize.com. 

The paint color decision was actually much harder than I expected. The monetary consequence of choosing the wrong color was remarkable–the pressure was on to get it right the first time. After having to place several different orders for samples of different colors of paint, I finally found a shade that my husband and I both liked. Amazingly, it didn’t have any weird undertones at all! It also looked great, whether sunny or shady.

My final decision was to paint the house with Sherwin-Williams Useful Gray, one of their most popular gray shades.

The funny thing is, to me it doesn’t look very gray.

Useful Gray is a gray-beige, or “greige.” Depending on the light, it either looks like a warm, soft gray, or a stony beige. It reminds me of a rock that you might find on a river bank, and I find it to be calming.

For the white trim, I selected High Reflective White, a bright white that matches the aluminum trim around our windows and back doors. I also elected to have the painters use the white paint as an accent on the stucco arches at the top of the windows, the front door pillars, the soffits, and the architectural detailing along the exterior corners of the house.

Garage doors

I am working on a separate post about painted garage doors. (It used to be posted on my website, but I have had to re-write all of my articles since the site crashed.) So it is written, but has not yet been re-posted.

We chose to paint our white garage doors dark gray, since the doors feature prominently on the front of the house. The shade coordinates extremely well with the roof, and it immediately updated our house.

Front door: Stain or paint?

I briefly considered having our wooden front door painted, but I quickly decided against it. Our doors have stained glass insets, and since the stained glass is colored, I worried that paint might clash with the glass. Therefore, I chose to have the door’s old finish removed and sanded, then stained with a dark walnut shade. After three coats of top coat lacquer, the doors shine as though they are brand-new!

Was it worth it?

I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner! It is absolutely worth it, even after the sizable price tag. In my opinion, the new paint updates the house so much that if we were to sell today, the paint job would more than pay for itself.

Yes, it was definitely worth it!