We spent a crazy long time designing our home, deliberating over every detail… and I’m so excited to share the exterior of our home with you here today, from my thoughts on choosing the perfect grey paint to decorating your front porch for a classic look!
There are so many decisions to make when it comes to renovating or building a house, and choosing the finishing and colours for the exterior is a pretty big one. It’s something you kind of want to get right the first time!
We ended up choosing a Hardy board shake from Woodtone [1] instead of a wood shake for the durability element. I’ve always love that look, a bit of a Cape Cod vibe. We live in a very dry climate here with a full range of seasons and the Hardy product, made from concrete, was the best product.
I really liked the grain pattern in this product (I didn’t think I would care until I started looking) and after looking at the stock colours, we decided to have it custom painted. Woodtone offers the service of custom painting your product in their facility so that it doesn’t have to be painted after installed (MUCH more work that way). They were amazing to deal with and the product ended up being so much nicer than if we had painted it by hand (never mind all the time we saved).
Now, let’s talk about choosing a paint colour. WHY is it so difficult? Greys are impossible – almost as impossible as whites. I knew that I wanted to use the Benjamin Moore [2] colours, and since I had already gone through it on the inside, the trim colour was an easy one: Simply White. It is the colour that I used ALL over our house inside, or the wall and trim colour and even for the paint colour for my kitchen and bathroom cabinets). Simply White is a warm white but not too yellow: it’s my favourite! If you’re interested in our kitchen renovation check out this post [3].
I quickly realized that the greys that I was choosing were too light for an exterior application. Grey Owl for instance was one I really like, but it essentially looks white outside. I fumbled through about 20 greys, buying those little sample pots and painting them on foam boards I bought from the dollar store (best way to test out the colours fyi). One tip: make sure to have the boards or samples standing upright on the outside of the house when you look at the colours, not laying flat.
I quickly realized that you need to choose a darker colour for the outside due to all of the natural light – otherwise it just looks washed out. We ended up going with Sea Haze which is a lovely warm grey with a hint of blue/green in it, and did it at 50% which means that the colour is only 50% saturated (just ask them at the paint store). I LOVE it and wouldn’t change a thing! That being said I wouldn’t be afraid to use it at full strength either, it is such a nice grey.
Our front porch is a decent size so I wanted to source lights that were a bit oversized – which weren’t easy to find! I found these ones pictured above and bought them in two sizes – the largest ones (3 light) for the front door and the 2 light ones for beside the garage. The white mailbox [4] and this amazing oversized natural fibre rug [4] were good finds to complete the look!
I originally had a couple of smaller planters beside the front door but realized that they looked dwarfed in that space. We worked with the sweetest team at Better Earth Garden Centre [5]in Kelowna to put together these amazing planters with cascading white flowers (mostly petunias) and top grafted lilac trees. We kept the trees in pots in case we want to switch them up for the winter (they will have to be pulled out of the planters and planted over the winter or kept inside). Go pay them a visit if you live in the area, they have such a great selection and are a pure joy to work with.
All of our doors, windows and garage doors are from Home Depot [6] and are Jeld-wen brand. Our hardware is from Emtek [7] – we went with the Melrose design [8] pictured above (Max’s fingerprints not included lol). We chose to finish the front porch step with Trex, which is a composite material that will last forever (also from Home Depot). Our driveway is poured concrete.
If you have any questions just ask away below! Thank you for following along on our adventure!
xo
Tori