Choosing the right paint colors for your house
It's this: Paint-color chips are vicious little liars.
"Don't believe the paint chip. Never believe the paint chip," says historical-color specialist Robert Schweitzer of Ann Arbor, Mich., who tells the story about a homeowner who handed her painter what she thought was a gray chip, left town and returned to find her house was lavender.
Funny: The chip certainly looked gray indoors.
Not funny: The repainting cost $15,000.
Choosing the right exterior color can be daunting, Schweitzer says. "It's not like painting a wall or buying an ugly shirt." If you choose wrong, "it's a very expensive mistake."
The alternative is for you and your neighbors to live with it for the estimated five to eight years the paint job will hold up, if it's otherwise done right.
Maybe that's why so many people choose to play it safe. According to the Rohm and Haas Paint Quality Institute, white is America's most popular exterior paint color (34 percent), followed by beige (28 percent), gray (15 percent), blue (7 percent), green and yellow (6 percent each).
"It was a light baby-poop yellow," she says. Now the body of the house is an olive green, the trim is a sand color and accents are painted in two shades of brown. "It really looks great," she says. "Everything just flows together."
They worked with Schweitzer to select the colors, starting with a decision on a new roof shingle. Based on the colors in the shingle, he suggested seven color candidates for the body of the house.
They bought a quart of each color, slathered them on big pieces of plywood and propped them in front of the house, Judy Stone-Gaynor says. "We drove by, we walked by. It became part of our life to look at those colors."
After narrowing the seven choices to two shades of green, they painted a large square of each one on the back of the house and lived with them, through fall, winter and spring.
Once that choice was made, the colors for trim and accents fell into place, she recalls.
"We have people stopping left and right and asking us for our colors, but you can't use (the color scheme) on a Victorian or a Four-Square house. It just doesn't work."
That's because the architecture of your home should be the starting point for choosing an exterior color, advises Donna Schroeder, a color marketing and design manager for Dutch Boy Paints in Cleveland.
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