a facelift

There's no better time than summer for updating a home's facade. Especially in Oregon where it rains 98% of the rest year. Constantly. Summer hit us a little earlier this year, as evidenced by my crazy garden. So we've jumped anxiously into our *summer* home updates: painting the house foundation.

We finished painting the house last summer, and just love it. But our foundation was dragging down the nice paint job and the house. As a reminder, here's the before:

The light blue-gray foundation did nothing to compliment the house color. And, it was peeling. Under the gray was red. Oy.

We started with powerwashing the house foundation. Meeessssyy. Lots of old paint - red and blue - come off in the process.

Next we set about choosing a color. We knew we wanted to go darker. Darker grounds the house and looks more polished. First attempt:

*Note: please ignore the yellow grass. We aren't so good with yards yet.* We thought choosing the darkest shade of the house color would be nice. It would have the same tone, while grounding the house. As you can see this color was. Not. Good. I learned a very valuable paint lesson. Color appears much lighter in light spaces than on a color chip. Shades and shades lighter. Ick.

Back to the paint store we went. We came home with three colors to try. This is the color we chose:

So much better. Dark gray. It compliments the roof and the house trim. We are so happy with it. There's actually more to this project. Stay tuned to see how we jazzed up the entry way a bit and quickly added *curb appeal.*