How to Choose the Right Colors for Your Home’s Exterior Paint Job
Choosing the right colors for your home’s exterior paint job is crucial. The wrong color palette can make your house look jarring compared to the neighborhood and surrounding environment.
A professional painting company can help you develop a color palette appropriate for your home’s architectural style and era.
Consider Natural Elements
Consider leaning into color palettes based on your region if dramatic dark hues differ from your style. This will help you narrow your shade options by ensuring the hues you choose work well with other elements that can’t be changed, like the shingles, brick, or stone accents on your home’s exterior.
Also, pay attention to the direction your home faces. Light from the west may amplify red, pink, yellow, or orange undertones, while light from the north can bring out purple and blue undertones.
Similarly, earthy tones will help your home blend in if lush green trees and shrubbery surround you. If your home is nestled into a mountainside, consider using darker shades to make it stand out.
Look at Your Neighbors’ Homes
Homeowners often consider their neighbors when choosing the right colors for their exterior house painting Burlington. After all, it’s a highly visible project that affects the whole neighborhood! While it’s okay to stand out, you don’t want your house to look so bright and cheery that it jars against the rest of the street.
Unless you’re one of San Francisco’s famous Victorian “painted ladies” or live on the beach, bright or saturated colors can look artificial and unnatural on a house’s exterior. Instead, coordinate your paint color with natural or permanent elements like brick or stone. If these surfaces have a similar undertone to your paint color, they will look more coordinated and less like an afterthought. Also, look at your neighbor’s houses in different lighting conditions and times of day to determine how the color might appear. Luckily, many leading paint manufacturers have easy-to-use visualizer tools to help you test different color combinations without buying paint samples!
Look at the Sun’s Light
How a color looks outside your home will depend on its exposure to sunlight throughout the day. The sun’s rays will change its appearance over time, making it look lighter or darker than it is. To ensure that the color you choose will hold up against the sun’s rays, having a professional take a sample and test it on your house in direct and indirect sunlight is a good idea.
Your home’s architecture and style also influence the colors you may want to consider for it. Some architectural styles lend themselves to specific color palettes, and a very bold hue might look out of place on a ranch-style home or a Victorian.
To get ideas, drive around your neighborhood and note the color schemes you like on homes in similar architectural styles. You can also flip through decorating magazines for inspiration. Then, ask your local paint store or contractor to list potential paint colors that will work well on your house.
Test the Colors
The best way to ensure the colors you choose work for your exterior is to test them on your house. Paint sample boards and hold them against your home’s brick, stone, and other fixed natural elements. This is important because you must know how these colors look under different lighting conditions. For example, light from the west can amplify warm red, pink and yellow undertones in neutral shades, while light from the north brings out cool blue and purple undertones.
Another important thing to remember is that an exterior paint job lasts seven to 10 years, so you need to consider the color scheme’s longevity. Choosing a trendy shade may be fun, but it could go out of style quickly, leaving your house looking dated. To avoid this, stick with classic colors that will stand the test of time. Many leading paint manufacturers offer visualizer tools on their websites that allow you to select a photo of your home and play around with various color combinations.
