How to Paint your house black

This post has been a long time coming. The day we bought our fixer upper at auction, this is what it looked like:

The first thing we focused on was the landscaping. Once that was under control I was pretty quick to tear off that ugly peeling rail around the porch.

 Then we HAD to do something about the paint color. After just grabbing paint swatches that I liked, these two were my favorite:

We ended up choosing Benjamin Moore Wrought Iron. I love how it’s sort of charcoal, sort of blue, and just generally moody.

I started out planning on using a friend’s paint sprayer to do the house. This meant that I did a TON of taping. Thankfully our windows were being replaced that week so I didn’t have to tape around any windows. The bad news was that the paint sprayer leaked super bad, so I ended up painting it all by hand.

It took FOREVER… like parts of multiple weeks throughout the summer.

I even painted the garage door. It actually was really simple. I just painted around each square then rolled the rest. I used regular exterior paint in white.

This is what the back of the house looked like before:

Here is the back after. Our paint project even included giving the shed a makeover. By the time I got to the shed I was so exhausted that Matt stepped in and helped me knock it out.

Here is the finished product in front! It also helped that we got new windows, and finished building the landscape planting area.

We also put up the Copper Craftsman Exterior Fixtures that I blogged about earlier this week.

So you can see the major improvement, here’s a few “Befores” and “Afters”:

This entire transformation only cost us the about $200, which was the cost of two 5 gallon buckets of exterior paint. Pretty extraordinary! I hope you love our dark and moody exterior paint update as much as we do!

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