Adam hasn't seen these yet, so this may all be a moot point...I guess my questions here are this. Does the cream look funny with the grey roof? And if I painted the trim cream, could I leave the rest of the house white, or would it clash too much or look super unfinished? There are also beams running across the porch ceiling that could be painted cream, and the gable vent could be both cream and red. I have seen white clapboard houses with red brick porches, so it might actually work. I sort of like the idea of the porch as a facade... I'm just worried about the cream fitting into the equation. I'm mostly just not sure I'm ready to take the leap of painting the whole house a color.These things stress me out.
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I'm going through the same thing, with the addition of I'm not sure if we're taking the siding off right away or not. So we have a gray roof (which I really regret now, having checked the Bungalow Exteriors book out of the library and discovered that bungalows can have any color of roof as long as it's not gray), dirty white siding, and screamin'-green Astroturf on the porch, all of which is going to change but potentially not right away. And almost all the color schemes I want have cream trim, and the trim is what *does* need painted right away. Gray roof, cream trim, white house? I'm still not sure.
On the other hand, my archaeology seems to indicate that this house was at one point white with brick-red shingles in the gables. And possibly (grayish?) green trim, but maybe not at the same time. And the roof could have been brown, green, gray, or black (and was all of those, at one time or another. Possibly even all at the same time.)
Argh.
I think it's time to get both the Bungalow Colors *and* the Bungalow Exteriors books out of the library again.
All I know is, painting the ENTIRE HOUSE would be such a big do-over if we got it wrong, that we're just going to start with the part we know we like-- the brick red-- and go from there. I like the cream with it, but I'm not sure I can commit to the entire house being another color, and I also like the white trim with the red; with a little more colorful landscaping, I think it'll be good. If it's funky in a bad way, I'll start trying out trim colors. No need to get ahead of myself!
As for roof colors, we had green before the storm. It was far too limiting, in my opinion. And I've tried to start taking the approach that we're not restoring the house, we're renovating to suit us, while trying to maintain the integrity of the place. A roof color is not an irreversible act, and we're trying to keep with the general idea of Arts&Crafts-- to help the house blend in a little more with the landscape. We're all working with what we were given by POs. In our case, this involved a starkly painted white, which patently doesn't fit the A&C bill. So as far as I'm concerned, we're moving it back toward its original intent, without making ourselves crazy or breaking our budget.
That's all we can do, I guess!!
Yeah, for some reason when we had our roof replaced in '04 I thought about gray or green and decided that green would be too limiting. Now I want a brown roof... why did that never occur to me?
And ditto on the renovating rather than restoring (I use the term "rehabilitating," given the condition of parts of ours) - I want to keep things somewhat historically appropriate, but not locked into the past. Of course, the interior having been gutted and "modernized" and the exterior having been vinylized, there's really almost nothing we *can* do to make it more inappropriate. Very freeing. :}
What about a color other than cream?
You've been saying pretty consistently that you don't want to paint the whole house because it's more of a project than you want to take on at the moment. So I think that treating the porch elevation as a facade - almost separate from the house - is a good approach. It allows you to keep the white body paint (for now) but also increase your curb appeal. It seems though (and it would depend on the actual color you choose for sure) that cream is so similar to white that it might make the paint job look a bit unfinished. So I'm thinking that something that provided a little bit of contrast, while still being light (and appropriate for a bungalow) might be the way to go. What about a pale bungalow green paired with a brick red?
Thanks for weighing in on this, Stephanie. I guess our resistance here is not so much the physical project, but our own emotional preparedness for changing the color drastically, and feeling generally out of our depth. Someday we'll get there...We'll probably have to put at least a thin coat of white on the whole house in order to satisfy the insurance settlement and escrow BS that we're grappling with-- inspectors, percentages of completion, etc, etc... We're buying a sprayer for this purpose. Thing is, we're a couple of nervous Nellies when it comes to this. So we're going to start with the porch columns and take it one step at a time. Right now I'm really liking the red and white. Also, since tearing out the porch ceiling, we've found more unpainted brick to use for color matching.
Perhaps we'll get a match as close as the other painted houses in the neighborhood and decide to paint the whole thing red...then we'll really have a trim debate!
(And BTW, I like the green as an option...it's going on the list!)
No white! Have you checked out the book Bungalow Colors: Exteriors? It shows really nice combinations. There might be some neat accent colors that would work with your great brick red. I think the author is Schweitzer, and he has a web site too: http://www.historichousecolors.com/
The good thing about the book is that it tells you the color name (I think they used Sherwin Williams) so you can get the right color if you like a particular one. At any rate, I'm totally jealous of your porch columns - they are so monumental and make the whole facade quite impressive. Nice!
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