small house, great love: outside painting

I am so excited to share this post today!

(It is a long one, so hang on.)

After repairing the front porch rotting wood and gutter situation, we were so ready to get our game on with finalllllllly painting the outside of our house.

Yay!

So, here is a before.

Really, when I look back at these photos, I cannot believe how unloved this place used to look. We have spent the last four years in our small house loving the inside, taking on all kinds of projects and getting it to where we want it. We have sort of putzed around with the outside and got a few things done that really needed to happen (like losing the shed, and sprucing up the back yard), but this next project was a game changer.

Here is where we left off after fixing the front. So awkward with the white and the brown and the beige. All kinds of "what in the world is happening here?"

And the back before:

Ugh. Just not a fan of all this brown.

Especially here:

Oh my goodness. This photo was taken before it got to even be much of a spring, and nobody's yard is looking like much. But this is just too much. This has to go.

This space has so much potential to be amazing, but it just sits there being un-amazing. We have big plans for getting more use out of this space, too.

But, first, paint!

Per usual, we started this project one evening with the intention of "just seeing how it looks". But once we got going, we were in LOVE! Even more than we thought we would be.

We thought we would start on the back garage wall since we knew it would be such a dramatic difference. Let me tell you, even just doing this one little corner, we were hooked.

Isn't it lovely?

We were so surprised at how great the white covered the brown. We thought for sure we would have to take a second pass at it, but not so. Perfect coverage on round one.

Using this sprayer was super easy. The sprayer is the red motor with the handle on the top of the paint bucket. The tube from the sprayer just pops into the paint. The super long spraying hose makes it easy to go a long way without having to move everything over every time you make a little progress. And you don't "carry" any paint, so it's light weight and easy.

It was actually fun - The transformation was amazing!

Just about finished with this section, but it went so fast, we just kept on going.

Seriously, the setup took longer than the actual painting. We blocked the roof line with boards to keep the shingles from getting sprayed. The few spots we missed, Hero touched up with dark brown paint - Piece of cake.

Let's talk about over-spray for a minute. Man, that paint can sure get away from you in a hurry. Before you even realize what has happened, you have paint somewhere you didn't intend.

Like this window:

Oops. (We actually got a fine mist on almost every window, which I scraped off with a razor blade when we finished the whole project. But still easier to clean off than to cover every window.)

We were so excited to keep going we did the whole back of the house.

Just look at the difference!

Time to clean up. Cleaning the sprayer was actually pretty darn easy - We had everything put away in about 30 minutes.

Except for one tiny piece that fell out of the handle that we absolutely could not find to save our lives.

Until several weeks later after we had already bought a new handle. Dang.

We turned the corner of the house and moved right along. There were a few little spraying mishaps (Hero was sporting a leopard type pattern for a while), but mostly we moved along at a great pace.

Except we underestimated the amount of paint we would need. But what is any kind of house project without running to Lowe's a few times?

Doesn't the porch look dreamy?

You can see what a difference this is making on the freshness of the house. It's pretty obvious where we left off.

Backing up a bit - What a difference! It looks like a different house. LOVE.

(You can sort of see the front of Hero's shirt - It was covered.)

Painting the garage doors finally. I have been wanting this done since the day we moved in.

Night and Day.

Annnnd, turning the final corner. This is the last wall.

Hero got caught climbing up onto the shed roof by our neighbor looking out the window. She was giving him some friendly grief :)

I finished the rest of this wall and covered the final bits of brown.

I think we spent about 8 hours total spraying the house. Not bad!

As Hero went around touching up the over-spray, I took the after photos.

Wow. That's all I can say is wow.

This house was built in 1958. The original color of the trim and everything we painted was white. Bringing it all back to the original made this home so much more charming, probably just like in the 50's.