Color Consultant for House Painting: Video Transcription
John Shearer: Many color consults begin with this conversation, “Hi. I’d like to get a color consult. Can you do it tomorrow? Because the painters are coming the next day.” There is pressure for the home owner and painting contractor. On this project, we have a long runway. I feel very positive that we can get a color combination that you’ll be very, very happy with.
Today, it’s beautiful being alive, to look at these colors. And, these colors – this color on your house – or this color on your house – and they wanna know a little bit about how colors work together harmoniously. You know? And that’s what this process is all about.
That’s blue and white. And this is a house on Mt. Baker, right around the corner.
Customer: Yeah, yeah.
JS: That used to be green.
Customer: That’s a historic house.
JS: Correct, correct.
Customer: Yeah, yeah, I watched your video on that.
JS: I had fun making it.
…house being built on the Eastside. Right now, there’s a currently installed monochromatic color scheme. And I think we want to go away with – we want a departure from that and go with something that has a little bit more contrast. So that’s what we’re going to explore today, and we’re going to take images of some of the architectural details. You know, 1909 was a different world. The people that moved to Seattle from the East Coast would buy houses like this. These were the custom houses.
And this is the front of the house, north elevation. We have a fence…there’s also a small fence railing on top of the detached garage that’s elevated from the street. People often ask what we do with these sorts of structures and it really depends on, first of all, what colors we pick, so if I project forward on what we might paint these colors, we’re gonna use some sort of very similar brown on the body, or have a contrast with the trim, like C2 Cotton. So, if we use C2 Cotton, which is a warm, white color, which is looks really good all the time, but looks really good here, especially in the Northwest, where we have a lot of gray overcast – it brings some warmth. White sometimes feels icy. So, if we go with the trim on this, the light trim, it’ll have a framing effect, which is maybe what we want. There’s a young child here, maybe we want the child to realize, “Don’t go out here.” Or, we might have this effect where we want this to look bigger.
So, we’re gonna go first with a test, a little bit brighter, more contrast in the trim. But what that allows on an old house with double-hung windows is the ability to put an “eyeliner” color. My friend, Robin Daly, calls it “eyeliner,” but it’s a sash color. And you can get away with using a very, very strong color.
