We Painted Our House! — Simply Well Spent

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These past two weeks have been full of the most recent house-reno project we have decided to tackle: painting the outside of our house. And I’ll be honest, it feels like a brand new place. OK, that’s a little much, but we are reallllly happy with how it turn out and are excited to share our most recent project. First, we will run down the whole process and then share some costs and final pictures!

Painting our house has been something we have been planning on doing for awhile. In fact, we actually bought two, five gallon buckets of paint back in May during a Memorial Day sale, which was just a month after we bought our house. So why did we wait? We had some other things we wanted to focus on first (see here and here to catch up on our bathroom reno’s) and while we couldn’t wait to get a new coat of paint on our house, the timing just didn’t line up.

Once our bathrooms were checked off up, it finally seemed like the ideal time to tackle this project. Plus, we wanted to get this outside work in right before a cold winter full of Alabama snow (hahaha, just kidding – but we did want to wrap it up before the holidays).

First things First

Now that we were finally ready to start painting, the time was at hand to pick a color. Sarah and I had gone back and forth on this a ton. I was more in favor of a darker color, like a gray, in order to hide to deficiencies in the siding. Sarah liked the idea of “the right white” especially because of how it would contrast with our green lawn. Our house used to be green, and while we didn’t mind that color and did have a green as an option, it just made for a lot of green with the yard.

After some deliberation, it was decided: we would paint the house white, the door green and the shutters greenish-black.

The specific colors we chose were Sherwin Williams Snowbound (SW 7004), Woodland Lichen (HGSW 3282), and Greenblack (SW 6994).

Prep for days

Before we could even get started on the actual painting though, we had a ton (it felt like a ton) of pre-work we needed to get done. There were some sections of siding that were in major disrepair. Some of the siding at the back side of our porch and on the front of the house needed to be ripped off and completely replaced. Once we put all the new siding on, Sarah gave the house a good light pressure wash to get off any gunk and dirt.

In addition to the siding, I wanted to cover all the nail holes in the siding with caulk- there were a lot of places where the nails had sunk into the siding leaving behind small holes. While I was at it, I also caulked up a number of seams around the house at corners and in between pieces of siding.

While I was doing that, Sarah was getting started on the first actual painting, which involved cutting in around our porch. Because we decided to paint the house white, we opted not to paint the trim a different color. Both of us had major praise hands for this decision as it saved us a ton of time. The only cutting in we had to do was around the porch – the rest of the house was all done via paint sprayer. We also decided to paint the door the first weekend – the weather was nice and our house would have to be doorless for the afternoon, so it seemed like a prime opportunity to get it done and out of the way.

The Main Event

After spending the previous weekend prepping the house, this past Friday we were finally ready to paint. The forecast was a little gray, unfortunately, and while it didn’t all out rain, it did spit occasionally throughout the day. In spite of this, I went ahead and started putting the first coat on in the morning. In the meantime, Sarah was working on getting all the windows and doors “boarded up” with plastic. I’ll be honest, it was a frustrating day. There were lots of starts and stops and weather checking and growling. Eventually, later that afternoon a full coat on 3/4 of the house and I was running out of paint, so we called it for the day.

Saturday, the weather was perfect for painting: partly cloudy! Putting the second coat on was a little more complicated because it blended in so well with the first coat. But all of the painting went very well – and I’ll be honest, one of the best decisions we made was spending $200 on a refurbished paint sprayer. A rental was going to cost me upwards of $115 a day anyway and I wasn’t certain that I could do it all in one day so I went ahead and got a refurb on eBay. I figured I could sell it when I’m done. Best. Decision. Ever. On Saturday, I put a second coat on the house in 3 hours. And just like that, painting the house was done.

As I mentioned, because we painted the whole house white, we didn’t have to worry about cutting in the trim in a different color. We just went all out. And outside of being one of our favorite decisions because we didn’t have to cut in all over, it also looks really good.

Final touches

As I was wrapping up the house painting, Sarah started working on painting the shutters. We kept our 4 existing shutters (supposedly not paintable – ha – we showed them!) and got a bonding primer to help the paint stick. And then we decided to go ahead and get 2 more shutters for the bay windows, which didn’t previously have shutters.

Our front door had a newer light fixture already there, but we decided to go ahead and update that with a more modern light. Since our old light fixture was relatively new, we just repurposed it to our back porch where it was easily a big improvement over the existing fixture.

Finally, the last touch was to add a fun little IKEA trellis to our fireplace. In the spring we planted some Confederate Jasmine vines at the base of the fireplace, so this trellis will give them something to climb (and fulfill all of Sarah’s English-countryside-cottage dreams along the way).

Money money money

As with most projects, we tracked the costs as we went along. And as with most projects (it seems) the little things pretty easily add up. We got a nice discount on the paint by getting that ahead of time during a Memorial Day sale, and the sprayer was refurbished, which added some nice savings. Outside of that, though, we just had to get all the basics, like brushes, tape, caulk, etc. It starts to add up for sure, but we feel like we added some great character to our home, as well as extended the life of our siding by replacing/repairing the existing issues.

Item	Quantity	Store	Cost
Graco Magnum X5 Airless Paint Sprayer (Refurbished)	1	eBay	$195
Behr Premium Plus Exterior Paint (5 gallons)	2	Home Depot	$278
Behr Memorial Day discount	2	Home Depot	-$112
Sherwin-Williams A-100 Exterior Paint (Shutters)	1	Sherwin-Williams	$48
Sherwin-Williams Fall Sale	1	Sherwin-Williams	-$20
Sherwin-Williams Paint Samples	5	Sherwin-Williams	$45
Bay Window Shutters	2	Home Depot	$54
Shutter fasteners	24	Amazon	$12
Exterior Porch light	1	Bed Bath & Beyond	$48
Vintage LED bulb	1	Amazon	$10
Caulk	15	Home Depot	$45
Fiber cement siding	5	Home Depot	$40
Askholmen Trellis	1	IKEA	$25
Paint brushes	4	Home Depot	$20
Plastic sheeting	2	Home Depot	$15
Painters tape	2	Home Depot	$10
Bonding Primer (Shutters)	1	Amazon	$8
Galvanized nails	1	Home Depot	$5
		Total:	$726