Color Confusion

Selecting colors is one of the trickiest parts of building a new home.

Cec and I agonized for days over exterior colors until we realized that that beige-green with medium green trim on the barn worked well on our lot, which is dominated by tall pine trees.  One of our objectives has always been to make the house look like it belongs on the lot.

We made several trips to Home Depot to match the color and eventually bought a quart of the main color and a quart each of two potential trim colors.  The scanned our color samples with their computer and amazingly matched them almost exactly.  We brought them to the house and painted three pieces of Hardie plank siding (a natural looking siding made of fiber-filled concrete), which we placed by the house along with the trim stone (man-made Marble Falls stone for the Texas Hill Country look) we had selected.  The main color and one of the trims looked very good.  We also viewed the beside the galvanized roofing and some of the trees.

We gave the painter the colors and a few days later we saw the scene in the photo above.  Our hearts sank.  We though it looked awful, especially the small sections above the windows, which are a story in themselves.  We chose windows with arched tops to contrast with the sharp peaks of the roof.  However, it is very difficult to build a curved frame from Hardie plank as you can with wood.  So the carpenter built square frame.  The painter did not know how to paint them and filled the upper corners with the trim color.  That made the trim color look oppressive and the almond windows stand out like neon lights.

The next day we call the builder that we wanted a different color.  He said, "No big deal," and told us he'd have the painter out the next day to select a different color.  The painter had been ill with flu when we made the original selection, and he apologized that we had had to do it on our own. 

The painter came out and told us that he had not liked our colors when he started to apply them but that they had grown on him.  Nevertheless, he agreed that a different color would be better.   We selected a couple of main colors that better matched the windows, and he agreed to buy small samples and paint the windows again.

(To be continued in the next post)