Planning Our Cottage Style Home Exterior Update: Paint Color Ideas And Inspiration

Our home exterior paint is in desperate need of a update and today I am sharing some paint ideas and color inspiration!

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Well friends, it’s finally time to give my home exterior paint color a fresh new coat. We were extremely fortunate to have moved into our 1930’s home after the previous owner had given the whole house a fresh coat of paint in order to boost the curb appeal to sell. He chose a lovely shade of gray for the siding that had a very classic look and cozy feel.

Honestly, I probably would have chosen a similar color, as many cottage-style homes tend to have a neutral exterior paint color scheme. You know I love my neutrals and you’ll find the interior color palette of my home full of various different shades of beiges, grays and white paint colors. In my opinion, these colors have a classic cottage look, so the existing gray siding was exactly the classic neutral I wanted for my exterior color scheme.

However, we purchased our home over 10 years ago and live in Michigan, meaning the exterior of our home goes through some pretty harsh weather yearly. The wear and tear is finally starting to show, and it’s time to give our home exterior paint a facelift.

This is a major project, so I have started looking for inspiration for paint exterior colors that will accent my existing crisp white trim, window boxes, front door, front porch stain, and the beautiful architectural details of my cottage style home. I want all of the charm and depth of my existing designed exterior that meshes so well with the natural surroundings of my yard and gardens.

Again, I really love the color of my home so I am leaning towards sticking with gray hues, but I am playing with adding a pop of color to the cedar shake siding of the A-frame portion of our home. The architecture is so beautiful and I really want to highlight this unique feature of my home.

Now, when I say “pop of color” I don’t mean bright accents turquoise or light yellow. I wouldn’t want deeper colorful accents like dark green, dark brown or charcoal either. My idea of a pop of color would be to take the existing color and darken it by 50%, sort of the opposite of the method we used with our window shutters. Maybe that makes me a little boring or basic, but that’s okay with me haha I really want a timeless look.

Here are a few inspiration pics I found on Pinterest to give you a better idea of the look I am going for. I plan to paint every part of my home that has the cedar shake a darker color than the siding. That includes the A-frame portion of my home, as well as all of the peaks like in these inspiration pictures.

Now that I have an idea of how I want to repaint my home exterior paint, it’s time to decide on the color. This is harder than you make think! A few years ago, my husband Mike and I tried to color match the existing paint to touch up a few faded spots on the east side of our home where the sun hits it. Every gray color we tried was too dark. We tried warm colors and then cooler colors, but nothing was working.

Unfortunately this means we will have to choose a whole new gray color, which is really a bummer because I do love our current color! Thankfully, I have already researched a few options that we will be color swatching a few paint samples soon! All of these colors are from Benjamin Moore, but you can get almost any color color matched at a hardware store if you are looking to save on costs.

Our favorites are Copely Gray, Sage Mountain and Antique Pewter as the possibilities for the darker shade on the shake. Herbal Escape and Winterwood are our picks for the lighter shade for the siding. Again, we will have to do some color swatches before we decide on anything!

We are also considering repainting our front door, so we picked out a few light blue shades to test out. Even though everything will be repainted, our color scheme really isn’t going to change all that much. I love the harmony of our current cottage color scheme with the natural landscape.

A few years ago we painted our door a darker gray color, but I’m debating going back to what we had previously. Here is the light blue color we used to have on our front door. I really like the light blue pop of color with our black outdoor furniture, storm door and lantern. We will definitely keep these black accents, as I feel every space needs a little bit of black to balance it out.

Well friends, I am so ready to get this project started and I will keep you all updated as we go along! I am sure you’ll be seeing a YouTube video in the next few months with our progress, and hopefully we can get this done before the heat of the summer really starts to kick in. What do you think about the colors and style we have chosen? Let me know in the comments below!

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