The Great De-Browning, Stage 1

By all accounts, the previous owner of our house seems to be a nice enough guy. But he seems to have cared for the color brown just a bit more than we do. In this case, "just a bit" is a nice term that means "a whole hell of a lot." We already painted over the living room, and we've embarked on a plan to paint the exterior and get rid of the two shades of brown there.

Over the course of three weekends, we completed the first stage - painting the screen frames, storm windows, and window sashes white. They were a flat dark brown. Luckily, we were able to take all the screens and storm windows down to the basement and paint in a nice cool environment, with baseball and HGTV on in the background.

It turned our basement into a war zone, but that's okay.





So, all of the window frames are painted now. You can see an old picture for comparison here.



Our overall plan calls for three stages:

• Window frames, etc. painted white. - Done!
  
• Rest of the trim painted blue. - Hopefully to be completed the rest of this summer and fall, getting rid of all of the dark brown by winter.
  
• Paint the body of the house light yellow. - Next summer, before we start having 97 degree days again...

Here is a (decidedly not an) artist's rendering of what we're going for. That brown blob in the middle is a beautifully refinished and stained front door. It's cleverly disguised, I know.



We're working with California Paints, which received top marks from Consumer Reports. So far, we're very happy with the quality and the way the window frames look. For the rest of the trim, we plan to use Beethoven Blue. The body of the house will be something similar to Fresh Lemon.