Avoid costly paint mistakes by doing homework, trying test patches

By Ann Weber, Toledo Blade

Published July 25, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Photo by Herral Long / The Toledo Blade

Judy Stone-Gaynor spent nine months deciding on a new color for her Arts & Crafts-style home in Ohio.

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If you're planning to paint the exterior of your house, one of the most important things you need to know has nothing to do with scraping, caulking and priming.

It's this: Paint-color chips are vicious little liars.

"Don't believe the paint chip. Never believe the paint chip," warns historic-color specialist Robert Schweitzer of Ann Arbor, Mich. He tells the story of a homeowner who handed her painter what she thought was a gray chip, left town and returned to find her house was lavender.

Funny: The chip certainly looked gray indoors.

Not funny: The repainting cost $15,000.

Choosing the right exterior color can be daunting, Schweitzer says.

"It's not like painting a wall or buying an ugly shirt," he says. If you choose wrong, "It's a very expensive mistake."

The alternative is for you and your neighbors to live with it for the estimated five to eight years the paint job will hold up, if it's otherwise done right.

Maybe that's why so many people choose to play it safe. According to the Rohm and Haas Paint Quality Institute, white is America's most popular exterior paint color (34 percent), followed by beige (28 percent), gray (15 percent), blue (7 percent), green and yellow (6 percent each).

Judy Stone-Gaynor says it took her nine months to decide on a new color for the Arts & Crafts-style home she shares with her husband, Skip, in Toledo, Ohio.

"It was a light yellow," she says. Now the body of the house is an olive green, the trim is a sand color and accents are painted in two shades of brown. "It really looks great," she says. "Everything just flows together."

They worked with Schweitzer to select the colors, starting with a decision on a new roof shingle. Based on the colors in the shingle, he suggested seven color candidates for the body of the house.

They bought a quart of each color, slathered them on big pieces of plywood and propped them in front of the house, Judy Stone-Gaynor says. "We drove by, we walked by. It became part of our life to look at those colors."

After narrowing the seven choices to two shades of green, they painted a large square of each one on the back of the house and lived with them, through fall, winter and spring.

Once that choice was made, the colors for trim and accents fell into place, she recalls.

"We have people stopping left and right and asking us for our colors, but you can't use (the color scheme) on a Victorian or a Four-Square house. It just doesn't work."

That's because the architecture of your home should be the starting point for choosing an exterior color, advises Donna Schroeder, a color marketing and design manager for Dutch Boy Paints in Cleveland. "A Cape Cod, a Craftsman, cottage, Victorian - all those have different color schemes," she explains.

"Ask yourself: What is the style of your home?" Study pictures in books, brochures and online for homes that look like yours, Schroeder suggests.

Once you determine a palette appropriate for the architecture, look around the neighborhood. Older areas of a city generally have a greater variety of styles, she says. A hodgepodge means that "Sometimes you don't have to do what's expected." A boldly painted door or bright accents could be right at home.

"In the suburbs you tend to have more uniformity," Schroeder observes. "There are a lot of neutrals, earth tones, khaki and tans, softer whites." A turquoise door might be as welcome in such a neighborhood as a skunk at the block party.

Schroeder advises taking color cues from brick or stone accents on the house or patio. Looking at the colors you've used inside the house also may help.

Schweitzer, who works with clients across the country, says he uses a 27-item checklist to come up with possible colors for a home. The list includes such factors as the roof color, the direction the house faces, the amount of ornamentation and neighboring houses in addition to the style and age of the home.

"People don't know how to get at what they like," Schweitzer says. "They can recognize a house that looks awful but can't look at a well-done job and say why it looks so good.

"One of the big problems is, they find a house they like and try to translate that to the colors of their house, and they aren't related (in style) at all."

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