Chelsea Gray FTW: choosing exterior paint colors

Exterior painting in progress at Little Farm

The exterior painting of Little Farm should be wrapping up today, which is super exciting! We’ve been waiting for this milestone a long time. We first picked our paint colors way back in September, and were hoping the painting would be completed in the fall. It didn’t play out that way for whatever reason, and as the cold weather of November in New England set in it became clear that exterior paint would need to wait until spring.

With April temperatures, the painting crew arrived about a week ago and it’s been really fun and rewarding to see the progress each day. It was also a little scary, to be honest. Choosing colors for the exterior of your home is a BIG decision that can’t be easily changed. Even if you do your design research and make mockups and explore lots of options (which we did) — you simply can’t know until you see in real life how the paint colors will look on something as big as a house.

Turns out we couldn’t be happier with the colors we chose. We are thrilled! And I’m excited to share some notes about how we made our design decisions.

“Medium dark gray”

We knew the cedar shingles would be gray — that was already determined by the builder when we found the property. We had the opportunity to choose the particular gray from Benjamin Moore. Great! That narrowed us down to 233 shades of gray. No problem.

Next I started thinking about contrast. The house already had a (nearly) black roof. The windows have white trim and muntins. (I just learned that word, meaning the dividers between the panes.) Perhaps most importantly, there’s a large section of white trim framing the two lower windows on the main body of the house.

That section of white trim is the feature that most influenced my color selection for the shingles. I wanted it to pop! So I knew I would steer toward a darker (less bright) gray, to create the contrast I wanted. That said, I didn’t want to go so dark as to blend with the roof. That put me in the ballpark of “medium dark gray,” whatever that is.

Exploring options

Kind of like white paint, nearly every shade of gray paint has undertones of some other color. While we may think of gray as black with more brightness, or white with less brightness — take a look at the gray color family on the Benjamin Moore site. You’ll see groupings of gray with undertones that follow right across the ROYGBIV spectrum.

Mockup of Little Farm in Amherst Gray

I made really quick, low-fidelity mockups of the house with many gray colors. I used a photo of the house and added a few shapes to fill with color. Then I pulled swatches off the Benjamin Moore site to apply as the fill color to the shapes all in one group.

Once I set up my silly mockup with fake grass and plants, it took me maybe a minute to change the color to another shade of gray. The image at right shows Amherst Gray. A little too cool and steely.

I wanted something with a bit more warmth, so I veered from the blue-greenish undertones of Amherst Gray to the subtle purple undertones of Chelsea Gray.

Amherst Gray and Chelsea Gray

It’s really amazing how such a small variation in color can make such a big difference in the look of the house.

I probably did this with a dozen shades of gray, getting more clear each time on what we liked and didn’t like.

In the end, it was completely worth it to spend the time and effort to home in on the right choice for our Little Farm, which is Chelsea Gray.

Trim and doors

We knew the trim would be white, but of course it’s not that simple. Picking white paint is even harder than picking the right gray. There is really no such thing as pure white paint. But if there was, it would be blindingly white in direct sunlight. The definition of white is that it reflects all the light.

Oxford White and Black Satin

Therefore, I aimed for a softer, slightly off white. It couldn’t be too off, because “standard” white things like windows and downspouts would be placed against it. But I wanted to take just enough off the full brightness so as to reduce glare in the Cape Cod sun. We chose Oxford White, which has just a hint of warmth.

For the exterior doors, we knew we wanted black. On the opposite end of the spectrum from white, black is the absence of brightness. We wanted a black that would read as pure black, but with just a little bit of softness. Black Satin hit the mark, with perhaps the slightest of gray-blue undertones.

Coming to life

Revisiting our color selections six months after making them has been fun. It reminded me of how much care we put into every decision along the way. I’m grateful that we did so. It’s also truly thrilling to see your vision coming to life at the end of a long home construction project.

Little Farm in Chelsea Gray, with Oxford White trim and Black Satin doors