Home Improvement Project #1

My husband got the dog so now he is allowing me to "get" what I want, and what I want is to finish up some home improvement remodeling projects that we have been talking about forever.

The first item is painting the outside of our house. Each year I go to my sister-in-law's house in Indiana and walk her neighborhood for ideas on painting my own house.

I found this house (above) with purple shutters and decided this was what I wanted. The shutters are actually Wineberry, but it is close enough to purple for me. I LOVE purple, and no one, absolutely no one in Florida has these shutters that I have seen. So I took the picture for future reference.

Problems arose when my husband refused to purchase the already made "wineberry" plastic shutters. He wanted to paint them. Matching the Wineberry color was more difficult then I could imagine. I tabled the project.

A year later, I went to Home Depot and found this picture (below) that I thought matched the above. I liked the green with the purple shutters, but my next-door neighbor's house is a green color and I didn't think two green sid by side houses would work. So I stuck with the tan house with the Deep Aubergine shutters.

When I got the okay to do the job I headed to Home Depot and asked the painter guy to hook me up with these two samples. He whipped them up and when he took the lid off of the cans to show me, I about fainted because the Deep Aubergine was PURPLE, and I mean PURPLE.

The tan color, known in Glidden painting circles as Kennett Square was way too light. Back to the drawing board. I spent quite a few hours searching the web and the paint aisles of Home Depot and Lowe's. Then it was on to Sherwin Williams because hubby thinks that paint is the top of the line for exterior paint.

At Sherwin Williams they can only give me a sample in quarts. Seriously? Who came up with that bright idea? Who wants several quart samples of paint they dislike? Using information from an architect friend of mine (who took my Glidden picture and transferred those colors to Sherwin Williams paint), I moved a tad darker down the chart and came back with two quarts of this color:

Still not what I want. So instead of going back once again to the drawing board, I've moved on to home improvement project #2. Sometimes it is better to step away from things for awhile.