One of the things
the new roof forced us to do, was to make a decision about the "look" we are going for as we repair and remodel the house. When we first bought it, we wanted to restore it to a near original look and condition. If we had the time to put a new roof on ourselves, we could have chosen something more authentic looking than common asphalt. In researching roofs I was interested that according to
this article, asphalt shingle roofs were fairly common in the 1920s. However, they weren't at all the same as they are today. If the insurance company hadn't been
breathing down our necks, or if we had unlimited funds we could have made a different choice, but common sense practicality won out in the end.
So why did we choose white? To me, a white roof is the only thing that makes sense here in the South. After all, our summer heat far exceeds our winter cold, and white reflects heat while black absorbs it. You'd think that would make it a no-brainer in this part of the country. Amazingly there are a lot of black roofs around here. The entire new housing development down the road has them, as do many of the other new ones in the area. One of the roofing contractors we got an estimate from told me he didn't think he could get white, but he had a lot of black if I was interested.
Anyway, all of this is the long way of getting around to what this blog post is really about, choosing a color scheme for the outside of the house. Once the roof color was chose, the question in my mind became, what siding and trim colors go with a white roof? And a red brick foundation. Perhaps if I wasn't a
fiber artist, color coordination wouldn't matter so much to me, but it does!
When I googled "house colors to go with a white roof," I found lots of discussion for black, brown, green, and gray roofs, but none for white. The I found a fun tool, the
Sherwin-Williams color gadget. It lets you choose a house style, and then play with wall, trim, and door color combinations. My trim is already white, so I decided to leave that as it matches the white roof. The door I didn't care about and there was no option for the foundation. So as much fun as it was to play with, it still didn't give me an answer.
What did give me an answer was our
recent trip to Pennsylvania. I paid attention to roofs and color schemes as we drove around. I noticed a lot of red brick, just like what we have. I noticed some white roofs too. I also noticed a popular trim color was a brick or barn red. So when I saw a gray home with a white roof and brick red trim, I shouted, "Eureka! I'm going to paint our house blue!"
How did the gray inspire that? Well, it was the shade of gray actually. I hadn't been able to visualize how the color value of the siding would relate to that white roof until I saw that gray house. Besides, blue is similar to gray and I like blue better, especially a blue-gray for a house.
According to my historic house research, this color wouldn't be that far off the mark for the age of our house (1920s). I found some blue-grays on two old house paint color cards at the
Old House Colors website. Their images are all copyrighted so I can't show you the cards themselves, but you can see one of them
here, and the other at the end of
this article.
Lastly, to pick up the color of the red brick foundation, I'm thinking about putting up shutters painted a brick red color. So our basic color scheme would look something like this ...
With white trim and brick red shutters.
We've already started scraping and sanding the badly chipped and peeled sections of the house, and are applying a coat of primer to protect the wood. We'll work our way around the rest of the house, removing the vinyl siding as we go. The will obviously take some time and with winter around the corner it won't be done any time soon. Even so, it's a relief to have the decision made and the work begun.
UPDATE 28 October 2011: We have begun painting the house. To see how the color scheme looks,
click here, and scroll to the bottom of the post.
This brick is original to the house, which was built in the 1920s, so it is 80 years old at least. It was not made with modern methods, and so the bricks are not uniform in size. We have two different types....
This is the cross section of one of the handmade ones. The clay was rolled into shape and put into a mold just like kneaded bread dough in a bread pan.
This one was likely made by a machine which pressed out long ribbons of clay, which were cut into the individual bricks. If you are interested in more detail about how bricks used to be made, you can read it here, at How Bricks Were Made
The second step was to "glue" the bricks in place with a masons mix.
Finally mortar was applied to fill in the spaces between the bricks.
An hour later, DH scraped the excess off with a trowel. Three hours after that, a stiff brush was used to remove even more. The last step will be to use a brick & mortar cleaner to remove any mortar remaining on the brick surfaces themselves. We plan to finish all the brick work first however, and then clean it all at the same time.
