Painting our house white!

August 27, 2021 in Exterior by Brenda Hernandez

This post has been a long time coming – I’ll blame the delay on distractions like it being summertime and playing with our dog, Sadie. If you follow us on Instagram, you know that our house’s exterior has changed a lot this summer! It got a total makeover, thanks to some woodwork and fresh paint. In fact, our 50-year-old house is actually looking pretty fresh and young these days!

When we bought our house five years ago, we knew that one day we would paint the exterior a different color. Our house was originally grey, with grey shutters, a grey roof, grey trim, you get the point. Check out the {grainy} picture below for reference:

After we prioritized some interior projects like renovating our house’s only full bathroom and updating the kitchen, we turned our attention to exterior projects. We started with more affordable jobs that we could do ourselves, like landscaping, painting the front door a fun color, and restoring the gravel driveway. Then, we moved on to a big ticket item in 2020 – putting on a new roof. Our home improvement budget took a hit after that (roofs are expensive, but necessary), so we took a year off from making exterior upgrades.

Now it’s 2021, our budget has recovered, and we’re ready to finally make the change we’ve always dreamed of making – painting our house white!

Picking a Painter

First things first, we needed to hire a quality (and affordable!) painter for the job. We got a total of four quotes from different painting companies, ranging from $7,600 to $11,200. We were pretty shocked to learn that painting our house would cost about the same as what we paid for the new roof, but exterior painting really is hard work. In fact, while we normally DIY all of our painting projects, we bowed out of doing this one ourselves because we knew how much work it would be. Pete and I both have full-time jobs, so the DIY projects we take on are typically weekend-friendly. Prepping and painting an entire house would have taken us forever.

Ultimately, we ended up choosing a painting company that several of our neighbors had used. We got to see their handiwork in-person, and not to mention they gave us the lowest bid too! We happily signed up with them, and two days later, the work began.

Prep work

The first step was power washing the house. Like any painting project, a durable finish goes hand-in-hand with good prep work. We were actually out of town when the power washing step happened, so we can’t comment on how many hours it took them. But we can say that we came home to a clean, mildew-free exterior!

Two weeks later (painting companies typically have multiple jobs happening at once), a carpenter showed up to replace all of the rotten trim and shingles. For the age of our house, there actually wasn’t too much rot. We had a couple areas of trim replaced, a few windowsills, and some small sections of cedar shingles. This took the carpenter a full day.

This side of our house needed the most carpentry. You can see the new trim boards (white) and the new shingles (wood-toned), which will all blend together once they’re painted. Next, the whole house got a thorough sanding. A team of 3-4 workers palm-sanded each and every shingle over the course of two days – talk about labor intensive! Seeing this step made us REALLY grateful that we weren’t doing this project ourselves.

Same side of the house, different angle. This picture is after the first day of sanding. In hindsight, we really should have closed the garage doors before we took these pictures 😂

Painting

After the prep work was finished, we got hit with a couple days of rain. Rainy weather meant no further work could be done until the house dried. Playing the waiting game at this point was hard!

Luckily, the next day Mother Nature sent us some sunny summer weather. The painters started at 7am sharp and put in 13.5 hours of work straight. We were so impressed and appreciative for their hard work. We made sure to keep a cooler stocked with ice, waters, and Gatorades under our deck for them. And after that long day of painting, this is how our house looked:

Our dreams became reality and our house is white! The painters used a paint sprayer to knock out the body of the house quickly and with a nice, smooth finish. You might be looking at the windows and wondering – why did they paint the glass? Well, the window glass is actually coated in something called masking liquid. If you haven’t used this before, it’s pretty awesome. It’s basically a clear coating that you brush onto the glass instead of using painter’s tape. You can paint right over it, and then just peel it off afterwards. It’s a huge time-saver when you have to paint a lot of windows.

With the body of the house done, the only things left to paint were the shutters, gutters and the back door. The painters finished those on Day 2 of painting, and then reattached them to the house. Finally, they went around and pulled off the masking liquid from all the windows, did paint touch-ups where needed, and wrapped up the job by noon! To make sure we were 100% satisfied, the owner of the painting company stopped by to do a final walk-through with us. Besides a couple of crooked shutters (that they quickly fixed), we were thrilled with how everything turned out!