A home's color announces its personality.
The paint color of a house tells a good deal about a home and who lives inside: it establishes itself among other homes; it either wants attention or rests quietly; it evokes an immediate sense of the home's energy. Complemented by your home's design and layout of your yard, deciding the color for your home warrants time and consideration to achieve a satisfying result.
Scan the Neighborhood
As HGTV recommends, walk around the neighborhood to get a sense of what colors local homeowners have used and range of differences. If you live in a community where most of the home colors are muted or variations of brown and beige, then painting your home in brash colors will stand out significantly. You'll need to decide whether you want that attention, or if a homeowners association will come knocking at your door. On the other hand, if you live in a neighborhood of historic Victorians, each with a fun and bright color scheme, then you have much more leeway with expression. If you decide to complement your home's color with neighborhood paint schemes, you can still add personal flair with accents, as HGTV notes, or with painted design elements, such as shutters or window boxes.
Know Your Yard
While we may think of the home's color and the landscape design as two separate entities, ideally they should work together. Look carefully at your home's yard, how it is designed, and what colors and tones emerge during different parts of the year. A home with a thick, green front yard may best couple with a somewhat subdued color scheme to keep attention on the vegetation. On the other hand, a home with a small but well manicured front yard, or no real yard at all, may want a richer color scheme to offer curb appeal. Also consider how your yard will evolve over the years. Will trees and shrubs continue to grow, will you keep the current design or do you plan a major overhaul in the near future? Taking time to plan how the home's color and shape of the yard will work together will save you from extra work in the future.
Test Run
Before painting an entire surface, we often test out the paint with a small swatch to see how the color looks outside the can. The same rule applies for a home's exterior paint. But the scale needs to be larger and in more places. To get the best sense of how the color scheme will look and feel, you need to apply generously sized patches of paint on the exterior. Don't forget to apply all the colors you have in mind, including trim and accents. And don't just paint the back or side of the house--apply the colors to the front as well to get a sense of how the finished result will work. Once you have applied a significant amount of paint in different areas, step back and evaluate your work. Be sure your applied swatches are near your yard's design elements, such as stone, a fountain or a rose garden, to see how the two will complement each other. Also evaluate your paint scheme at different points during the day. A color may look great in the early evening but blind passers by at high noon.
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