Choosing the Exterior Color Scheme

Today's musical selection:

If I ever get done priming and sanding all the pieces in my lifetime, I will need to paint them.  Pretty much everything needs to be painted before the house is assembled.  So to make any progress, I had to decide on an exterior color scheme, a project that resulted in almost as much endless waffling on my part as the original decision of what to build.

I looked on the web for pictures of "Painted Ladies" because I wanted my house to have a Victorian look. Pinterest is a great source for this, just go there and type in Painted Ladies and you'll hit the jackpot. This was a good site also:  http://www.paintedladies.com

It also happened that we had a vacation planned, and we went to Cape May during this period. Cape May is one of my favorite place on earth, and yet I ams so obsessed with working on this Miniature House that I was borderline annoyed by the interruption the trip presented. While we were there I had lots of Victorian architecture to look at for inspiration, and I also found a little fireplace in an antique shop, so the trip was satisfying on many levels.

I took this picture on Gurney Street, both for color schemes and because the design of the houses kind of reminded me of the Strawberry Patch:

Victorian Houses in Cape May, New Jersey

I took the picture of the Delsea House below because of the fancy wood trim.  The Strawberry Patch kit came with some trims that I thought were kind of unrealistic, but as it turns out they are taken from actual Victorian style houses:

The Delsea House, Cape May NJ

Curlicue Trim from the Delsea

Curlicue Trim from the Strawberry Patch

Porch Balusters from the Delsea

Porch Balusters from the Strawberry Patch

But I digress, because I was talking about picking a color scheme.  So all of this research was interesting but didn't get me anywhere in terms of making a decision. What I finally did, at the advice of my wonderful husband Bob, was to take a trip to the Home Depot to get paint brochures.  They do the work! Here is the Behr brochure I picked up.  It contained dozens of designer-approved color schemes all mapped out for me:

The brochure is many pages long, so it didn't completely eliminate the angst and indecision, but at least I knew that whatever colors I finally picked would look good together.  So after much consideration, I settled on the color scheme at the bottom right on the page above, because it is similar to a real house that I see and admire on the way to church every Sunday.

I record the colors here for my future reference:

Walls:  Behr Pale Sagebrush - No. ECC-38-1
Shutters:   Behr Sea Fern - No. ECC-38-3
Trim:  Behr Ultra Pure White - this is different from the color scheme, but I preferred the pure white

You can buy little sample pots of all these paints for $2.99 each at Home Depot, so you don't have to spend a fortune on full size cans.  I bought two pots of the Sagebrush and one of each color for the shutters and trim, which should be enough.

Behr paint sample pots have screw tops, which is so
much nicer than dealing with traditional paint can lids.

Naturally, as soon as I got the sample pots home I realized that I totally should have picked one of the other color schemes.  But I am going to try not to be so crazy and stick with what I chose.  So now I can start painting!