We Painted Our Old House

As many of you long-time readers know, we live in an old house. With 4 kids, we feel like we’ve outgrown it. But we are staying put. In fact, 2 and a half years ago, we were THIS close to moving. We even had a purchase contract on another house.

But we had second thoughts… we love our old house. We’ve traveled down that road of buying a nice big house, and it got us into trouble. Instead, we were determined to make this one work.

I was actually inspired by my grandparents. They lived in the same house for over 50 years. That’s the way that generation did things. They had their house and that was that; no moving unless absolutely necessary.

Instead of constantly upgrading, they made their current house work for their family – no matter how many children they had. And for the record, they had more kids back then. Our family size of 6 would have been pretty normal in the 50’s, when the average number of children was 3.7.

Anyway… back to our house. Because we are staying put, we have no problem investing in our home. We started by finishing our attic last year.

For this year, it needed a new porch and a paint job. We had the porch rebuilt last month.

For paint, instead of the normal paint job, we really went for it. We did some research and used historic colors that would have been typical of Colonial/Victorian homes from 100 years ago and came up with this:

Here’s another shot of the porch:

Bold? Yes. But it’s us and we love it. It certainly sticks out on our block, but in a good way.

And we did it for a really good price! I don’t want to reveal the actual price we paid out of respect for the painter, but I’ll just say it was less than $5,000 to paint the WHOLE HOUSE using a total of 5 different colors! We got a few quotes, and went with the one we trusted the most. He was recommended by several contractor friends of ours, and his quote was also the most competitive.

In addition, our town has grants available for investing in the exterior of your home. And since we painted our house using historical colors, we will get $500 back.

Have you done any remodeling or renovations this summer? I’d love to hear about it!