SPRING TO DO LIST // AND AN AWESOME PAINTING TOOL

This is our house.
Fear not, we do not have a heart plaque above the mailbox. That would be where the address is, le duh. Although I don't think I've ever really said what city I live in, let alone my street, one can never be too careful. ;)
We toured this house in April 2011, and it was the first of the day. We eventually went on to tour another house that we put an offer in on, and lost. When that fell through, we started thinking about this little guy again...and I'll be perfectly honest in saying one of the things that made it so easy to overlook initially was some of their heinous paint decisions. (Including the burnt orange kitchen with red-toned cabinets and forest green counters..and the fact that almost every room on the first floor was painted the same shade of brown...aside from the bathroom, which was a two tone poopy disaster).

We've slowly painted every.single.room. in the house (minus the master) but the last and perhaps the most daunting is the exterior paint. Initially I hated both the brown and the red. The above photo makes it look quaint-my cousin who shoots for City Pages took it in 2012 on Mother's Day, so it was on its best behavior. It being the house. But in reality, the brown is a chalky non-brown, brown. Also, I'm not sure if I'd hate the red as much if they hadn't painted the gutters and ALL OF THE TRIM red. It looks like a child's doll house.

I'd be lying if I said it hasn't grown on me a little.. but with the itch to take on a larger home project has come the itch to finally do away with the chalky brown.
There's been a trend in our area of DARK grey houses with a so-dark-it-looks-black navy blue trim/shutters (I knew no matter the color I always wanted to add shutters at some point).

I was wondering if there was a janky way to photoshop so I could experiment with colors when I googled "exterior paint color visualizer" and up came the most brilliant (no this is not sponsored but I still almost peed my pants) tool from Sherwin Williams called the Color Visualizer.

Not only can you photoshop on exterior (and interior!) colors to your heart's content, but once you paint the color on, after a second or two, the details of the exterior of your house show through. Meaning it's not like a giant chunk of color like it would be in MS Paint. It's pretty much the coolest thing ever.
I spent a good portion of last night tinkering with different combinations. Here were some of my contenders:

Although I kind of liked the teal triangle above the door in the above photo, M wasn't a fan.
I also realize this color could look outdated really quick so after I came up with the following combination, I think we found a winner: 

To keep the house from looking TOO "Pleasantville" We can add some more color with plants in the window boxes.
I also may drive around and see what the houses in our area do in terms of matching window boxes with shutters and the different colored pitched triangle (which actually seems to be pretty popular) to see if maybe I should work in a 3rd complimentary color somewhere, still. The door is also red, so I'll definitely be repainting that but that will absolutely be some sort of a brighter color!

We also want to strip and stain the deck this summer... since the previous owners used some terrible paint-stain hybrid..which means the deck has been CHIPPING since we moved in and now is greyed and patchy and awful. It'll be a bitch of a project, but it needs to be done.

Home ownership: it ain't all fun and games, people.