The House, she has been painted

You know, for a house blog, we’ve done a poor job of chronicling our house painting adventure.

For the last 4 years we’ve been working on the inside of the house, and ignoring the outside.  Primarily because, in our neighborhood, it seemed wise to not shine too brightly.  But also, we needed to do our living space first, and then deal with the outside aesthetics second.

At some point, we started to get very worried that the integrity of the house might be compromised.  Holes where birds were crawling in, shingles falling off, etc.  So we were resolved to do something.  And S said to me:  “I don’t care what it looks like, just get it painted.”  If I waited just a little bit longer, I could have maybe gotten a purple and yellow house!

At first we thought we were going to have to re-side the whole thing.  But pricing that out, it was clear it was very expensive.  Especially if we wanted to go with cedar shingle siding or hardy board.  And we weren’t sure if we wanted to go with vinyl siding, which was still quite expensive. 

After getting ready to bite the bullet, I realized that I’d never gotten a quote from a painter.  So I went to the Home Show, got a few numbers, and arranged a free estimate.  This was mid-November.

We knew time was running out (you generally can’t paint past November) so after the first quote with a clearly very knowledgable painter, which was THOUSANDS of dollars less than any siding quotes we got, we decided to go ahead.  At the very least, it would buy us some time to save up the money.

(Although we had a little bit of a problem– we’d been saving up our home equity to get the painting done, and just as we got ready to pull the trigger, they lowered our line of credit!– Fortunately, I talked to them, and we worked it out, and all is good in financing world right now.)

We went away for Thanksgiving, and while we went away, they painted.  We wanted the fumes to be as far away from our little bundle of Aaron as possible.

Coming back from the airport was very exciting– we barely recognized the house!

There’s still some stuff that they need to do/redo (and weirdly, some of the trim color looks like they didn’t use the same dark blue) but overall we are very pleased with our makeover.

Anyway, here’s some of the before- and after pictures.  Someday, we’ll take the exact same before photos in the after pose.  But for now, here’s what’s changed.  Pretty big change, yes?