Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Color me drab

I have pretty much settled on the colors for the exterior of our split-level ranch house. It's been in dire need of paint since before we bought it, and now that we've added some patches of white primer over the baby blue siding, we really are going to have to get it painted fast, before we become permanent "bad neighbors."

I showed my colors to Luther, and he said they were pretty boring.

But here's the thing: A split-level ranch IS BORING.

Quick, try this: Go to your nearest paint supplier and look at all the brochures with pictures of houses. Or if you're lazy, do some web surfing on "how to paint your house," and look at all the pretty photos showing examples of how various color combinations work. And tell me, do you see any ranch houses in the examples?

No.

Because they're BORING.

A long time ago, I decided that a small room should be painted a dark color. White paint is not going to make a small room bigger. It's just going to raise the light levels so that you can really see the clutter of trying to crowd your belongings into such a small space. Dark paint... is cozy. It's right for a small space.

Our house is a split-level ranch in an oddly woodland setting in the middle of town. Let it be simple and calm, with colors that blend inoffensively with the trees and the leaves.

That's it. That's my plan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember there were two identical split-level ranch houses near where my parents live that used to have stucco, then wooden boards, and they painted the wooden boards like rainbows. Both of the houses! I sort of liked it...

bekbek said...

Our cars have dents from when we were sporting bumper stickers supporting the wrong presidential candidate. I can only imagine what would happen to our house if it had rainbow siding.

On the up side, it might be amusing.