What Color Should We Paint Our House?

Antique Earth (top) Manuscript (bottom)	Gargoyle (top) Dark Olive (bottom)
Samples on the garden wall	Left to right: Antique Earth, Manuscript, Gargoyle, Dark Olive

So, our renovations took a bit of a hiatus. It gives me kind of a thrill to write that in the past tense, because it's nice to think of myself as looking back on it rather than seeing it as a scary part of my present life. I was unemployed for 10 months, but now I'm back to work with a steady income, which means that we can continue what we started with this house, now three years ago. The Great Recession may not be over, but it's over for me.

One of the biggest challenges for a renovator in being unemployed is that suddenly you are spending so much time in your home space, and you have a chance to really contemplate all the things you want to do. But you don't have any money to do them, so you have to just sit on all those desires. I guess the silver lining is that during my time off, Jim and I had a lot of time to talk about the order of progression for the next steps in our renovation, and about which of the renovations top our list. I had lots of time to book contractors to come out and see the place and bid on various projects so that when I went back to work I could just hit the go button.

We agreed that exterior paint needed to be the next big project, primarily because it's messy. If we waited to do it, we'd probably get paint on whatever other projects we would have done. So that's the plan. And we've narrowed our choices down to a range of colors, as you can see in the pictures above.

Here is a picture of our house as it looks today:


(You can click on it for a closer look.)

Our initial thought was that we wanted something dark. Our windows are a fixed color. They're almond vinyl and can't be painted. So we're going to make the color of the windows the accent color for the whole house and paint the trim the same color. So we're looking for something kind of dark, with a hint of green.

And here are a few photo references from houses around West Hollywood:

What do you think? Which one works for you?