House Painting Debacle

Today, I planned on showing the progress we have made on painting our house.  Instead, I am going to tell you about the debacle that painting the house has turned into.

Let me remind you what our house looked like a couple of years ago.

In the past couple of years, we have removed most of the awnings that were completely disgusting.  We removed hedges and old landscaping that was overgrown.  All of this was done in preparation for painting the house this year to start the process of updating the exterior of our house.  Needless to say, we were extremely excited to get the ball rolling.

We picked out a medium gray color that we liked (Almost Charcoal from Lowe's).  We wanted to start out on a small section of our house to make sure it was the right color.

I started with this small section on the back of our house.  I painted 2 coats of the gray on the vinyl siding, 2 coats of white on the gutter and corner piece and 2 coats of black on the foundation.  We were pretty pleased with it.  It was a huge difference from the stained white that it was before.  So we decided to proceed.

I painted all three sides of this small section of our house (the dog's room) and thought it was finally starting to look like a decent house.  We bought a 5 gallon bucket of paint to tackle the largest parts of the house.

We were so excited to paint the front of our house because it is the most visible part of the house.  As you can see in the before shot, the front was in bad shape.  The siding was moldy and stained and the awnings were hideous.  It was going to be such a relief to improve it.

The above photo is after the first coat of paint.  Something strange started to happen at that point.  The siding was starting to warp.  My worst fear was turning into reality.  It doesn't look that bad in this photo.  Let's take a closer look.

As you can see, the warping was all over.  It looks horrible.  If you look back at the other sides of the house there was some warping as well, but not as bad or as noticeable as the front of the house.  We aborted painting at that point.

After some research, I discovered that you can paint vinyl siding ONLY if the paint color is the same color or a lighter color.  Repeatedly, I found this information "DO NOT paint vinyl siding a darker color".  Well, that was a complete bummer.  We had no idea that only darker paint colors would have this effect on our siding.

We were completely devastated.  Painting our house was going to cost less than $200 for the whole house and detached garage.  Now, we are looking at way more money to fix this mess.

After thinking about what to do for several days, we have decided that replacing the siding is our only option.  We don't want to live another couple of years with deformed siding.  The silver lining in this debacle is that we are going to get what we ultimately wanted.

Here is a rendering of what we are planning on doing.

We are going to focus on the front of the house this summer.  It will be done in phases.  We are going to start with adding the deck that we wanted to add for a long long time.  The second phase will be replacing the vinyl siding with LP Smart Side Panel Siding (an engineered wood) which is a vertical siding (what I always wanted).  We will still paint it the medium gray that we bought a 5 gallon bucket of.  The third phase will be adding the pergola over the deck area to add some shade.

I am not sure when we will begin this process, but I will keep you updated.  So what do you think?  Have you ever failed so miserably on a project that it ended up costing you way more money?

Before I go, I want to announce that the winner of the paperback copy of Living in a Nutshell is:

Ingrid@nowathomemom who commented:

WOW! the spaces you showed us are beautiful and unique! :-) I love them! I will go and visit her blog! thank you for introducing Janet to us! :-) & how nice of her to send you a book for your followers! :-)

Congratulations, Ingrid.  I will be in touch.

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