Prepping the House for Painting

Aaaah, home ownership is fun! The exterior paint started peeling last summer and has accelerated since, leaving me with no other choice but to find a painter this spring/summer. I discovered that the most recent paint job was a quickie, probably to sell the house, and they didn't even paint the back of the garage! I didn't even know that and am embarrassed that I didn't. My neighbors behind me, though, probably wondered when I would find out.

So, to document progress, I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the different phases. He we have Chris, the painter, in the first phases of prepping the front and side of the house.

I've always disliked the rug that was on the front porch, so I wanted to take it off and repaint the porch a nice contrast color. It was a bit of a discovery, that's for sure.

There are some cracks that need repair...

And the 80 years of paint that Chris chipped away.

Chris is also fixing little things here and there, like making the door frames more appealing, which he says doesn't take that much work, as he's got lots of smaller pieces of wood lying around. I wish it were that easy for me. :-)

This is just to show you how bad the peeling had gotten. Apparently, this was a sprayjob, with no priming. It lasted a couple of years. At least I get to pick a new color, since I was never really thrilled with this one, anyway.

These are the various colors I tried out. I'm going with the last green one for the body of the house ("moss print"), the orangish one ("Moroccan sun") for the contrast color, and the trim will pretty much be similar to what it already is. I'm glad that I took Mike's advice to get samples, because I saw photos of houses painted the other colors, and well, the colors don't look like the photos, that's for sure.

Stay tuned for future updates! This will be fun, watching my house transformed from drab colors to brighter ones.