ORC Week 2: When You Give a Mouse a Cookie
One Room Challenge Spring 2020, Week Two
The Spring/Summer 2020 One Room Challenge is underway, and we have been making slow progress these first couple of weeks. We’ve been getting everything picked-out and ordered since we can’t walk into many stores and shop for things in person due to COVID-19. With delivery delays, low inventory on some items, and customer service lines being clogged-up for what seems to be all-the-damn-time, things in our patio area haven’t progressed quite the way we anticipated they would by this point. Local nurseries have hour-long lines just to get in, and then once you load-up all your supplies and plants, the checkout line is another 20-30 minutes, so we just decided to order our plants online to have them delivered to our house. They should arrive by this Friday, and while the weather forecast is showing thunderstorms Thursday through Saturday, Sunday will be in the 70s and sunny, so that’ll be planting day! I suppose these are all the reasons why this time around, the One Room Challenge contestants technically have eight weeks (rather than the usual six) to make a transformation happen.
As of right now, all we’ve been able to do is power wash the concrete (which is SUCH a satisfying outdoor activity, by the way), hang some string lights under the pergola, and plant a few small flowers and shrubs. Oh, and my BIG exterior project that is going to make this patio transformation POP, with many thanks to our local Ace Hardware…
This is me—in need of some dry shampoo and some lip color, as my mom would say—power-washing the patio. Look at that form!
So what was my pricey plunge of a decision?
In my last post, I alluded to my most expensive “When You Give a Mouse a Cookie” moment, and that, my friends, is what I’m going to tell you about today! In case you didn’t read my last post, I’ll summarize the train of thought I had. It was…
What’s the point of putting all of this time, energy, and money into the patio/pergola area if the house (the backdrop to this space) remains puke-pink?
Our pergola came with our house, and it has a stained wood finish. It truly didn’t “pop” with the house being the shade of pink it was, so I thought about painting it white or black (because I had seen a few painted pergolas on Pinterest and loved the look of them). Upon looking into all of the prep and time it takes to paint a pergola, Jason and I decided that this summer wouldn’t be the best timing for that (we have a 15-month-old son who would be smearing that paint everywhere while we worked, and that wouldn’t be cool… plus, due to the Stay at Home order that was still in effect, our son’s nanny wouldn’t have been able to come watch him either). So get this—I actually considered painting just the back side of our house, and then realized two things: 1) The HOA would definitely fine us if we did that. 2) Anything worth doing is worth doing the right way. For these reasons, Jason and I decided it would be worth it to save up and eventually have our house’s exterior painted. I reached out to three local companies for estimates, and upon finding the one we felt most comfortable with (it was actually the middle estimate price-wise, but they seemed to cover all of their bases such as filling nail holes, back-brushing, and painting the under-side of our home’s siding boards), we knew how much we’d need to save.
Now remember, Ace Hardware is currently our largest sponsor for our One Room Challenge, so when I told my Ace contact about all of this, she discussed our exterior paint project with her team. They agreed that our patio transformation would have an even bigger wow factor if the house were painted a nice, up-to-date color. For that reason, our neighborhood Ace Hardware (Westwoods Ace—represent!) generously offered to cover the cost of paint and sundries so that Jason and I could hire the painters to come bring our 1999 house into the current decade. We covered the labor, Westwoods Ace covered the materials, and WOW, we couldn’t be happier with the way our house turned out!!
Deciding on a Color Scheme
Choosing the colors was a bit of a nerve-wracking process. This being the exterior of our house, and costing thousands of dollars, I wanted to be certain that the colors I chose would look incredible. There would not be a redo for this. As per usual, I started gathering ideas by studying my saved pins on Pinterest. I have a board titled “Dream Home Exteriors,” and by studying that board, I identified trends among the pins I had saved over the years. I had an even mix of black/dark homes and white/light homes, most of which had either wood or stone accents. All of the ones I saved had a modern farmhouse or Scandi-cottage vibe. Since our next-door neighbors have a charcoal house, I decided to narrow my search to light-colored home exteriors. I also paid attention to roof color in the pins I saved (ours is dark gray) and stone color (we have a warm-colored stone facade around our front door, office windows, and garage doors). Additionally, I knew I wanted the patio area to have my favorite color scheme: white, wood, and black.
Once I decided on doing an off-white exterior with charcoal accents, I went to our Westwoods Ace store and got a bunch of samples from Marcus. Now you have to understand, for the past three years since moving to Arvada, the whole paint staff at this store would see me come in and they’d know I was heading straight to their booth. Josh always asks me what project I’m working on now, and he knows I’m not getting samples for my husband or a hired painter because even when I was nine months pregnant with Joe, I was at that paint counter every other week getting samples for my own home projects and for my clients’ homes. James, on the other hand, tends to hang out and let me shop around until I’m ready to bring him my color decisions. Marcus might as well be running a three ring circus because he’s answering my questions in detail while dialing a phone number with one hand and prepping samples with the other hand. He also has more patience in his little finger than I have in my whole body (at one point, I asked if he could tweak the color sample to remove the blue, and he kindly says to me, “Well, I’d love to, but this color is composed of black and red. If you’re seeing blue in your sample, we can try to neutralize it by adding some brown and see if that helps…”). All three of these guys are SUPER knowledgeable about which products best serve my needs based on the project I tell them I’m doing, and they know where all of the other materials I’d need are located in their store. The store owner Tim also does an incredible job making sure no customer leaves unsatisfied. Our local Ace has such an amazing reputation in our community, and they’ve definitely earned it.
I digress…
After sampling all of the whites, beiges, grieges, charcoals, and blacks from the practically bottomless tub of paint samples I’ve bought over the years, as well as testing out new samples from our local Ace, the colors we ended up choosing were [insert drumroll] Edgecomb Gray for the body, Swiss Coffee for the white trim, and Black Knight for the accent (upper) trim and doors (all are Benjamin Moore colors that we had color-matched in the Clark and Kensington line—also available at Ace—to save us a little money). These colors all pulled from the tones present in the existing stone facade, so I was confident they would look great on a larger scale.
As I mentioned above, our paint was color-matched to Benjamin Moore colors, but we used Clark & Kensington Exterior Satin paint because I did my research and was more than satisfied about how effective this paint was, and at a fraction of the cost of “designer” paints. Both of them being Ace Hardware brands (Clark and Kensington paint and Benjamin Moore paint, that is), I trusted that the color-matching would be flawless, and it was! Besides, it wasn’t blind trust. Any time I’ve used Benjamin Moore paints from our local Ace, I’ve always asked for them to mix the samples using Clark and Kensington paint because it costs a little bit less than the Benjamin Moore paint sample cans. The colors ALWAYS turn out to be brilliant and beautiful, and this time was no different. Check out what our home looked like before being painted, and then look at how much more up-to-date it looks now! I should point out that we also swapped out the old, dated light fixtures for some new ones that are more our style (we used a light similar to this one by the garage doors—the one we actually used is no longer available online—and this one for the front porch). Our neighbors were quick to tell us how much they love the transformation, too, so that helps us feel even better about this decision. We are incredibly grateful to the team at our local Ace and the entire Ace Hardware corporation for helping us make this happen sooner than we thought we could!
