Painting Our Farmhouse – Drama & Prep

A few weeks ago I blogged [here] that we were painting our farmhouse. Well, it’s not painted yet. Everyday I get questions about if our house is painted yet or what color we chose so I decided to come on here today & share what our house looks like today after some prep for the paint & share with you just a little glimpse into why we were so delayed. I told you in the announcement about painting our house that we were hiring out for this large project because we wanted someone with a lot of experience in exterior painting because again it’s a huge job with a lot of detail work. We found an experienced painter who came recommended to us & all was set. Well, long story very short,  it was going wonderful & he seemed very excited about the project. The date came & went when he was supposed to start & it got pushed back a few times for various reasons on his end. This seemed odd to me, but I wasn’t going to complain because I was just so excited & I wasn’t in a terrible rush. Yesterday another day he was supposed to start came & I got a text saying that he was no longer going to do the project because of heat here in Michigan & I was left high & dry with no painter after over a month of waiting on him. Not a HUGE deal & I understand that some people can’t work in the warmth of summer, but a little annoying because he agreed to paint our home in the summer & maybe should have thought of the weather before agreeing. & in our area it’s hard to book a painter in this season because they are all so busy & our house was ripped up in preparation for him to come & he had come one day &  painted an area of our house to sample the paint & it was very visible large area. Basically our house looked kind of crazy & it needed to be painted asap. Again, there are far bigger problems in the world so I really told myself not to get too mad, but I went into full on panic mode & called a million painters on my way into a conference yesterday. Every single one was booked until next  year. Awesome. I got out of my conference yesterday afternoon & decided to call one more. It was like I won the lottery. I booked this amazing team who happened to have just finished a big project that day & were ready for another one this week, they were highly recommended by a friend, & seemed to be really excited to get to work because right after we spoke on the phone they came from the other job & started prepping the house at 7 o’ clock at night. Who does that? I was still hesitant. You see, the reason I’m sharing this is because I wanted to share my lesson with you guys. This is the first time I had been really taken advantage of when it came to house renovations so it was a little bit of a shock & I know it could have been much worse. What if I would have paid him something up front? What if I had needed something on a deadline? There are a lot of ‘what-ifs’, but again thankfully my situation was minor & thankfully I had found someone again because otherwise I would be typing something very different today like “PLEASE HELP! SOMONE SEND A PAINTER!” haha. Again, I’m not angry, but it is not very good business practice & left me questioning what I could have done different, but this new team is amazing & they are starting to prime the house tomorrow. Yay! Stay tuned for a whole new farmhouse. For now I wanted to share how we are prepping it, what it looks like today before they prime it tomorrow, & the last look of our farmhouse being blue…

Here is part of the house before…

& now after we have taken off all of the shutters & pressure washed the whole house…

So there were some quick photos of how the house looked tonight after a day of cleaning it & removing all of the shutters. I think I kind of love the house without shutters, but we will see if we put them back on or what we end up doing. So what color did we choose & what did we clean the house with? Here is that little update…

Jose was like a kid in the candy store the other day because the second he heard we had to clean our siding he jumped in his Jeep & headed out to buy himself a new Ryobi pressure washer [click here to see it]. I’ve never seen him so excited to clean something. Ladies if you need a gift for your man apparently this is it, I wish I would have known sooner because this would have been a great birthday present. Oh well, you can learn from that mistake of mine too. Buy it for him before he goes and buys it for himself. The whole house was cleaned with it & oh my this old farmhouse was dirty. It’s all clean & ready for paint now. The color we chose? We chose Behr Marquee white. It was our favorite white that we sampled on the siding & we are so excited to see the whole house in the color! After this long wait I can finally say I won’t be missing the blue, I’m ready for our dream white farmhouse. Thankful we found a new painter on such short notice & so excited to share the “after” with you guys!! Stay tuned & be sure to follow me on Instagram & Facebook for all of the behind the scenes! xx

 

See our sunroom makeover progress [here]

*Behr provided the paint for our house exterior makeover, but as always all opinions are my very own.