Thinking about painting your home? Invest a few dollars in some sample paint first!

Now that the majority of the interior projects are complete on the house we bought this summer in Del Paso Manor, my husband and I painted the exterior of our home a couple weeks ago. And probably much like anyone else who decides to paint their home, we spent some time collecting paint chips from a few paint stores before narrowing down our selection.

We wanted to paint the body of our house blue, the roof eaves and trim white, and add some red accents. And we picked out some paint that we thought would look amazing on our home. Turns out we were wrong about it looking amazing. It looked amazingly awful, a la a circus tent.

If you are planning to paint your home, or even just a room, I'd highly suggest getting a few actual samples to actually paint on your home first, before you invest several hundred dollars in paint. Thankfully, we spent $10 and purchased a small sampling of the three colors we chose, and painted a section of the side and some trim near our front door. Because if we had purchased 20 gallons of what we had originally picked out, we would have ended up with "that house" on the street that our neighbors refer to as "that Southwest Airlines house."

Once we decided those were not the colors we wanted, we went back to the drawing board and got some more samples with a little more color variety. Ultimately we decided to paint our house a richer, darker blue, with a richer, darker maroon accent. Thankfully my husband was willing to get his hands dirty and take on the exterior painting project, so we rented the equipment...and he and I spent the better part of a couple weekends prepping, masking, and painting the house. There's still a little touching up to take care of, but overall we are happy with the results. I'm hoping that our next home improvement project isn't until after the new year...it's a lot of work!