House Painting: Volume 1

We are brave. We may also be crazy.
We knew when we bought our house it needed something done with the siding. I am slightly ashamed it took us 3 almost 4 years to do something with it.  Now I am rather excited because we got some estimates and settled on DIY painting the house. We got estimates to replace our wood siding with vinyl and those were around $10,000-$15,000. Yes, you read those numbers right and yes I also had a mild heart attack when I was told this. We knew that this was not something we could afford without selling multiple kidneys. So, we started looking at other options and the one that worked best for us was removing any wood panels that were old and rotted and painting the house. The project went from $10,000 plus to $500-$800 max. DO not get me wrong it is going to be rather time consuming as well but we like a challenge.

The first step or volume shall we call it will focus on replacing the siding and picking paint colors.

Siding-
The side of our house (garage side) was in really ruff shape. It had really been tore up over the last 30 years and needed to be replaced. Ryan went around measuring what we needed to replace and off to Menard's we went. Forgot to mention before all of these steps the house was pressure washed. It took a while to locate a piece of wood that would work for us. Sadly they do not make wood in the size we needed anymore so Ryan had to choose boards that were larger and cut them down to size. Next we had to transport the 16 foot boards back to the house on our tiny trailer which I was surprised worked out okay with no deaths reported.

As you can see some of the boards were really really in crappy shape. Some of them almost became dust when removed. EEK.

 Here is Ryan cutting the wood to fit the spaces that needed replacing. The side of the garage had a ton of strange angles and was a bit challenging.

 Our first replacement board is up!
Ryan wanted all new boards on the bottom section since those seemed to rot the fastest.

We are almost done! Took a little over 2 hours to cut and place all the boards up. We were racing against day light to get them up. Not pictured Ryan also put up brand new end/corner pieces on the house as woodpeckers had went to town on them.

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Paint selection-
I want you to promise me that if you ever want to paint your house you get samples. GET all the samples. The bottom two colors pictured here were supposed to be the most delightful reds. They... well they were pink. I am not hating on pink it has it place in the world (workout clothes and baby's rooms for example). It for sure does not have a place on the side of my house though.

The bottom color I did not even put on the house. I opened it and starting laughing like a crazy person. NOPE to the nope on that color. The first two colors I put up were also pink as you can see in the top picture. Needless to say always buy samples because something may look great on the sample card and not be what you think nor want.

 Here are the contenders. I know in this picture they look the same but they have dried with the top being light and the bottom being a darker brown.

The colors in the running are "Red Farmhouse" and "Double Decker". We want to let them dry before we decide on one.

I will continue Volume two later this week with the joys of caulking the house and next weekend the start of actual painting. Stay turned for more house DIY.

Until next time~
XoXo Emily