ask home exterior decoration livejournal.

[rmd]

hello, and welcome to petty upper-middle-class first world problems!

i'm angsting about color for when they paint my porch in a few days.

i'm poking around on the benjamin moore website to look at exterior colors.

if you go to benjaminmoore.com and follow the trail of menu through "for your home" to "personal color viewer", you probably end up someplace like here. if you then select "home exterior" and photo 5, you end up with something kind of like my house. and while i'm not going to have the huge accent color they've got on the main front of the house, it's a reasonable place to play around with colors.

there's an accent color on the rest of the house that looks to be close to nottingham green (at least it looks it on my monitor), so i'll be using that for at least a bit of detailing so that it'll tie the porch in with the rest of the house.

the bulk of the house is white, so i'm thinking i'd like to keep the main siding white.

but i'd like one or maybe even two other accent colors -- one to put on the porch decking, and maybe one for the bannisters or perhaps just a bit of accent on the newell posts.

any suggestions? (you can use color name or number)

Comments

[scottro.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't you just go with something white like the house?

77

[rmd.livejournal.com]

oh, the siding will be white. i'm thinking about accent colors for the trim and newell posts and what color to paint the decking on the porch. if they paint the decking white, it'll look good for about 14 seconds until dust and cruft start accumulating on it.

ETA: this is just for the new porch -- the trim on the house will be white or (in a few accent areas) the light green color it is already.

i'm just thinking in terms of what colors go together well, because i suck at that kind of thing.

btw, my brother is totally grooving on the metal detector -- we had a good time poking around on his property digging up metal-wire-covered concrete blocks and bits of old flashing and such, and now he's got it and will be tackling more of his yard. thans for the advice!

[scottro.livejournal.com]

Ah, got it.

Do you live in the Bay area? it looks like you do from the pictures. If so, I would go with a nice blue shade, somewhere between the sky and the sea.

77

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i live in somerville, ma, which is right outside boston.

i was thinking a medium to light blue as a minor accent, and then maybe a dark green for the decking and some accent.

[scottro.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's right. Wrong coast. I suck.

I think it would look really nice with those colors.

77

[evwhore.livejournal.com]

But Massachusetts is the Bay State, so partial credit.

[pale-chartreuse.livejournal.com]

I like something in a medium to dark brown, like"Ten Gallon Hat". That would be good for the areas most likely to get dirty. Then find a darker green to go with the Nottingham Green. That would be a nice earth-toned palate.

If you are looking to go more wild, I'd suggest pairing the green up with something from the Tangerine side of the spectrum.

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

California breeze.

[muffyjo]

Ok, I am enjoying 'blue suede shoes' if for only the name (798) It is a bit dark with the Nottingham green. So if I were going to stay in the same tonal range, I might try indigo (744). I played around, putting Nottingham Green in as trim and then playng with other colors. Yes, I had to put a nice dusty rose but decided it was really too silly. I also liked grape ice (1395) put that's just sheer whimsy. I also switched to the darker color (Your Majesty - 1400) and was amused to find that I rather liked that too.

So yeah, I don't think you can trust my taste.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

So yeah, I don't think you can trust my taste.

Hm... I dunno... I liked your suggestions, particularly Grape Ice. Although I also like the darker tones ("Mighty Aphrodite", # 1397 or "Seduction", #1399").

Maybe you can't trust my taste either? ;-)

[solarbird]

Oh! I didn't know you were making it two storeys. Very nice! ^_^

I was looking through the construction photos and going, "Y'know, I'm not entirely sure that's adequate earthquake strapping..." and then was all, "...oh, riiiight." You and your building in geologically stable areas! ^_^

[solarbird]

I've been trying to match the existing colours of your house to elements selectable in this online tool. The problem is I don't know whether I've done that. (The other problem is that I'm not big on white houses or pastel blue trims. Sorry! *^_^*;; I find them difficult to work with.)

If the body is something like 869 (Oxford White) in real life and if the existing trim is something like 1674 (Polar Sky) in real life (as my monitor implies), then you're already mixing a warm white with a cool trim colour, and I recommending reinforcing the cool with 1413 ("purple haze") or 587 ("Scotch Plains Green") as a strong accent colour. But that's a lot of ifs and if you go with the green (587) you'd need to be really careful, and not have any large flat areas of it.

I would be very careful about going with a strong, bright colour, and avoid warms as far as you can possibly can with that blue. (Again, that's if I've identified a right or at least similar blue. If I haven't, then all this is wrong.) With that white and blue as base colours, I would go for intensity differential rather than colour or tone differential, if that parses.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

the existing trim color (mostly on the sides and a bit of the undersides of the vinyl siding soffits) is more like 569 or maybe even 568.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

heh. not *that* stable. we get a bit of a tremor every once in a while, and we're overdue for a big one.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

Two schools of thought: Tie them together with something similar that will go with the light green/blue, like Summer Blue.

Or: Many color schemes work when they are balanced, so something with a touch or red/yellow in it but of a similar strength, like Pearl Harbor or Barley.

[kjc.livejournal.com]

My suggestion for this sort of thing is usually "ask miss_chance."

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

Your house is not a Victorian, but you might see a color combination you like if you search images.google.com for: victorian house colors (http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=victorian+house+colors&btnG=Search+Images)