Painting It Red

Our first house, ca 1995, that's a dark red door!

In a rare moment of not doing everything ourselves, Roger and I hired a crew to paint our house. It was a big break from tradition. The first house we bought in Santa Cruz in 1995 was the most awful yellow-pea-green color with a crazy blue-green door. It was BAD. So, we set out to paint it one fine day, and many of our new neighbors walked or drove by to wave and THANK US for making such an improvement. We painted it a Navajo White, which is really a light cream, with white trim and a barn red door.
We are both wild about barn red. I think we may have talked about painting the Port Townsend house red, but then somehow the idea of shingling it was born, and that was that. Now that was a job. Roger and I must have blue-house karma. That big Port Townsend house was blue blue blue. Long-time Dharma Bum fans know the amount of work that project was, turning that blue house into a shingled beauty. When I was looking around at the old posts, I found a picture of the entry way of that house. Ah yes, there it was, our homage to red. We just love that color and managed to highlight it in the most lovely way here.
So, when it came time to paint our second blue house, we finally decided to paint it barn red (and have someone else do the work!). Here's a little secret about paint. No one can agree on what barn red is. We have swatches of red all over the sauna and the woodshed. Red this, red that. We drove around looking at house colors, "too dark, too light, too brown, too red, too weird…" We finally decided on a color "Brick Dust" and hired a fantastic work crew. It took them nine days to get the job done. We enjoyed their presence immensely, even when they arrived at 7:00 AM (to beat the heat). They were diligent, meticulous, good-natured, thoughtful and easy to be around. We liked them so much we barbecued a homemade pizza for them, and sent them home on many days with homegrown yellow squash and garlic.

What they gave to us was this.

PS-- I haven't even told you about the back of the house. It's the opposite color scheme. I'll do a post about that in a few days.