Pick a color...any color...

When we bought this house we knew there was a lot of work that we wanted to do...what we didn't know is that we'd be getting started this summer!! We just can't help ourselves I guess...so we decided to get to work on the paint job. So far the hardest part has been deciding what color because I can't make a decision to save my life. At first the house was going to be green, then I feel in love with gray, then I realized our roof was red so we settled on yellow.

Out of all the colors of the rainbow, yellow is probably my least favorite so I needed some options. After picking up about 10 pounds of paint swatches from every hardware store within a 30 mile radius we decided to use Behr paint from Home Depot (pronounced "deeee" - "pot" for those of you that didn't know). We found 4 colors that we liked, had deeeepot the mix up some samples and then started randomly painting the exterior of our house like we had the faintest clue what the heck we were doing.  Here is what we ended up with:

Quick tip- make sure to label your paint samples when you are testing them (see the notches next to ours?). I quickly realized there wasn't a huge difference between our colors and I wanted to make sure when we picked the right one, that I didn't take in a different color and buy 10 gallons of it!

So after letting the paint dry we decided to go with the most yellow color we had which was 1. It looked the best with our brick and we thought it would lighten things up. We picked out paint in perfect timing because Behr was running a rebate program on their paint ($5 a gallon back) so we picked up 10 gallons and a few paint brushes and went to work.

So far it has taken us about 6 days of on/off painting (during naps or after bedtime for L) to have about 75% of the house done with coat #1. Our cedar siding was starved for paint so it is just soaking up the first coat (good thing we bought those 10 gallons!). I don't want to share any after pictures yet because the first coat is very spotty with a lot of bleed through so it isn't looking that great. Hopefully we will only need to do 1 more coat or I might shoot myself.

Although it is hard work and a lot of time, painting the house ourselves is going to be SO worth it. We estimated we are saving about $5k by doing it ourselves. Cha ching! I think I'm going into business as a painter after this. ;o)

And on a slightly random note we started taking up the carpet in our sun room. Gross!! It was so dusty/moldy/gluey and just had to go. So here is a "before/during" shot of Bryan hard at work. We still can't decide what to do on the floor in here (paint it or do outdoor carpet) and the walls...but maybe we just need to save this for next year?

And on an even more random note...we have a hawk in our back yard! Here is a picture of it's nest. I've seen it circling the neighborhood once (Layla had to wave to it) and I'm not sure how I feel about this. We won't have a mouse problem, that's for sure...but it is a HAWK in our backyard.