Basic Painting Strategy

There’s not a whole lot to go over in this post about painting the house, but we’re pretty happy with the strategy we took so far: paint the whole interior white and decide after we’ve settled in what accent walls to paint different colors.

Too often people rush to paint their walls all sorts of crazy colors only to move in and realize the color scheme isn’t going well with their furniture or their lighting. We hired Excel Coatings to paint our exterior soffits grey (to match the metal roof), our interior walls mostly white, and we’ll be calling them back in in a couple of weeks to do a couple of accent walls for us. In the end, we’ve decided to only repaint one wall in the dining room and one wall in the kitchen. It’s really all the house needed and it should hold over us for the next 5-10 years until we paint the whole thing florescent green.

Costs accrued during this stage:

Interior house painting (Excel Coatings)$26,100.32
Paint supplies (Sherwin Williams)$161.40
Exterior house painting (Excel Coatings)$2,672.74
Post-construction painting and touch-ups (Excel Coatings)$5,290.08

3 Responses to “Basic Painting Strategy”

  1. Cali Says:

    “…it should hold over us for the next 5-10 years until we paint the whole thing florescent green.”

    You’ve been watching too much HGTV! I can tell because they can’t seem to paint anything without painting it either florescent green or pea soup green. Honestly, I don’t care if I ever see another green room the rest of my life. I’m so sick of green that I’m dead certain I will never paint anything green– evar!

    In all fairness it isn’t HGTV’s fault, entirely. Much of my hatred of green rooms stems from being a child born into a 60s world in which all rooms were, by law it seemed, painted either burnt orange, harvest gold or, my most favorite of all (end/sarcasm) avocado green. Of course there was the thrilling option of all three colors in one room, AKA the real trifecta of 60s paint jobs. My grandmother had her kitchen remodeled in those same colors, TWICE!!! ::shudder::

    At one point my mother decided she and my very handy step-father were going to redo their entire house themselves, room by room, to rid it of the Harvest Gold and Avocado Green scourge once and for all. When she and my step-dad got it all done a couple of years later they stood back to take a look and revel in their hard work and mastery of wood working, tiling, painting and wall papering, as well as all the amazing changes only to discover that the whole house was still Harvest Gold and Avocado Green! They had merely shuffled the colors around! Neither of them remodeled another thing for at least ten years.

  2. Yolanda Says:

    What color “white” interior did you go with? There are so many to choose from, and they all look different depending on the lighting and time of day. Did you do all rooms the same color white?

    @Cali, how do you feel about sage? We are thinking of painting our exterior with sage as our main predominant color……our house is in a wooded environment, and we don’t want it to stand out too much.

  3. Mike D. Says:

    Cali: That is a crazy story.

    Yolanda: Can’t remember. I think it was called “extra white” or “ultimate white”. It’s pretty, uhhhh, white.