Painting the House Exterior: Porch Soffit Edition

In yet another sign that the apocalypse went ahead and happened and 2016 was in fact our last year on earth and we are all living in some sort of weird alternate universe -  we have PUT PAINT ON THE EXTERIOR OF OUR HOME. 

I repeat: we have taken a PAINT BRUSH, dipped it in PAINT, and then APPLIED IT to our HOME. 

About (gosh!) six months ago, I got a wild hair and decided it was "time" to get down to business on painting the exterior of our house. Despite the fact that it had been over a year since I last posted about it, or since we had even done any kind of prep work, something about late August in Kansas just said ~paint your house~ to me. 

So we spent a good hour or so looking at paint colors and getting samples and then we sat them in the basement and that's where they sat for (double gosh!) two months.

If you've been taking your ginkgo, you might remember that time over TWO YEARS AGO when I posted about our repaired/replaced soffit on the front porch and our plans for the exterior.

It was all painted and primed and ready to go and it had started looking a little...rough so with the weather somewhat nice, my mom and I got started cleaning and putting paint on the soffit and front gables of the porch.

And here's a look just after we started the north side of the porch:

And with the scaffolding moved:

You can see that we got excited and painted a little bit of the siding as well just to be certain that the colors looked good. 

I sat out on the porch and looked at it in every light and I have to say, I'm really really feelin' it. Since these photos were taken we've had our Christmas decorations up, too and it looks pretty darn slick with the new trim paint.

Here's a look at the north gable before:

and after:

So much sharper!

And a little farther back:

We decided to do the interior shakes on the gables in the cream color and then just continue the pattern from the soffit up there, too.

I've known I wanted to paint the house green since we moved in so that was a no brainer but the trim was up in the air. 

A lot of the houses I saw on Pinterest had that greenish/grayish siding + white window trim + dark brown screens look and I felt that too for a while but I'll be honest with you, I was not looking forward to covering up the dark green window trim with white. 

Then it happened. Instead of working on our house, we were binge-watching Fixer Upper and in episode 1 of season 2 they visit a bungalow type house with green siding, and green and red trim. FYI: it's not the house they picked but the first one they looked at in the episode. 

"That's it!" I yelled. Here's a bad screen cap for reference: 

Now, admittedly our house is a little more intricate and a lot less covered in trees and bushes but after finishing this portion, I really feel like we're headed in the right direction! It doesn't look a whole lot different yet but once the siding has paint on it, it will be like a completely new house.

(lol at what the Jeep has done to our column : / antique automobiles, am I right?)

The next steps will be moving down onto the actual porch and painting the siding, columns, steps, ceiling, and whatever else there is on a porch. Can you hear the overwhelming-ness in my typing?

It's gonna' be a real process. My bet is on two years, my mom says one, maybe one and a half?
Place your bets in the comments if you want to make things interesting. Again, this will be for when the house is *actually* finished, not when I *finally* blog about it!

See you guys at some point in the future!

Thanks for sticking with us! 

Keep Smiling!!