The Art of Painting Accent Colors for Washington, DC Area Exteriors

Imagine you are driving through a brand new development of luxury townhouses.  You could be just off Montrose Road in Rockville, MD, or nestled up against Tysons Corner in Vienna, VA – the suburban growth of Washington, DC looks similar on either side of the beltway.  Clean, spacious streets stretch before you in a neat grid, edged with trimmed lawns and sternly shaped boxwoods.  Crouching behind the shrubbery are the townhouses, five of them in a cluster, each one trimmed with an identically subtle and tasteful combination of siding and natural stone veneer.  The result is attractive and respectable, but for the most part it doesn’t deeply impress you.  Something about the strict repetition in the colors and lines falls flat.

Until you get to the last house in the last cluster before you reach the cul-de-sac and have to turn around and head for home. That house, above and beyond all the others, truly catches your eye.  It has the same lawn, boxwoods, and veneer as everyone else, but the siding has been painted a warm mahogany brown, the trim and shutters a lively cream – and the front door a startling royal blue.  With a few planters of blue, purple, and yellow pansies in the windows and placed at intervals along the walkway, and a cheerful brass doorknob, this one townhouse launches itself into a decorative league above and beyond its identical cousins.

Curb appeal – the way a house impresses you when you first drive up and behold it from the road – plays a powerful role in how people (homeowners, guests, prospective buyers) experience a house.  Psychological studies have shown that two houses with identical interiors will make significantly different impressions on the average viewer if they have differing levels of curb appeal.  Psychological studies have also shown that color plays a strong role in determining the visual appeal of any space.  Taking the fundamental wisdom of color coordination and applying it to the design of an exterior, we see how much a composition can be enriched by the addition of one wild, bold color, applied on a small but significant portion of the architecture.

That splash of brightness is referred to as an accent color in design lingo.  The color scheme of any space – interior or exterior – should be composed of a ‘main color’ (which is applied to the majority of the “dead space” in the architecture – bare walls, siding, etc); a ‘trim color’ (or colors – which are applied to architecturally significant detail – window trim, shutters, porch or gable trim, etc), and then an ‘accent color’ (which is applied to only one architectural element, bringing that element emphasis in the composition).  In most neighborhoods, the main color on an exterior needs to be subtle if it is going to match, and the trim color, while it can sustain a little bit more intensity, should also stay within a tastefully mellow range.  The accent color, however, is where the design visionary can go a little wild.  Provided that the hues you choose are well balanced on the color wheel (we expect to blog about the color wheel shortly, so stay tuned), and that the portion of the exterior that you choose to paint is both reasonably small and reasonably integral to the composition (the front door is a perfect example, although you can certainly use other parts of the building) an accent color that packs some punch will be sure to draw the admiring eye.

Wallpapering Tips From a Professional Contractor

It’s all in the planning.

Wallpapering a room is a simple and dramatic way to change the whole feel of your interior – and it is also a process that requires care and attention in the execution.  While none of the steps involved in wallpapering are difficult, if they are done without precision you will be dismayed to see how small errors become amplified into a serious flaws.  That is why Blue Door Painters puts such an emphasis on the planning and set-up of every wallpapering job we do – and why, if you do it yourself, you should too.

Here is wallpaper in a nutshell.  It comes on a roll, which must be cut to strips of the appropriate length and then attached to the wall with an adhesive, (which either comes pre-applied to the back of the paper, or must be purchased separately and applied to each strip by hand).   So the process of wallpapering boils down to how perfectly you measure, cut, and apply the strips to the wall.  The only reason precision is paramount is that the pattern on the wallpaper will cause any seams that don’t hang straight or match up to show vividly.  Taking the process one careful step at a time is the best way to go.

So get a pencil, a measuring tape, a level, a square, and your roll of wallpaper.  Check the width of your wallpaper roll, and remember that number – that is how you will space your seams along the wall.  Next, pick the spot in your room where the mismatched seam will go.  This should be a spot where the seam will be relatively inconspicuous (but avoid corners, because ideally you shouldn’t have any seams placed in corners).  Wallpaper is designed to be applied in vertical strips, so measure and draw a straight line going from the ceiling to the floor, aligned at a right angle to both.  Take extra care with this first line, because in the installation it will serve as a guide for orienting the whole project.

Working from the first straight line, measure out even intervals the width of your wallpaper roll all around the room.  Make a straight, 90 degree line at each interval – this will be the placement of your wallpaper seam.  Now you are ready to start making cuts and installing the paper.

In a clean, clear working surface in the middle of the room, spread out your roll of wallpaper.  Measure the height of your room, and then check the pattern of your wallpaper to see how much the pattern will displace your paper at each seam (line two strips of paper next to each other, and then see how far you have to push one of them down in order to match the pattern up).  Add that amount to the height of the room, and then add six inches of margin for both the ceiling and the floor.  This is the height that you want to cut your first strip of paper.

Provided that your wall has already been thoroughly cleaned and primed, as it needs to be prior to any re-coating procedure, you are now ready install your first strip of wallpaper.

Apply or activate the adhesive on the back of the strip of wallpaper, following the manufacturer’s instructions.  Then climb onto a sturdy ladder placed so that you can easily reach the ceiling right at your first seam line.  Working from the top down and the inside out, line the edge of the paper up to the seam line that you drew, and press  the paper gently into the wall.  Make sure to leave about six inches margin at the ceiling crease.  You can use your hands, or a professional wallpaper smoothing trowel, to get a smooth finish; just make sure that you take extra care that the entire backing of the wallpaper strip adheres thoroughly to the wall.

You can adjust the paper while the adhesive is still wet, so now is the time to check that the paper is perfectly flush along the seam line you drew, all the way from top to bottom.  Once you are happy with the placement of that strip, you can trim and flatten the seams at ceiling and floor using a straight knife, and turn your attention to the next strip.  Make sure to line it up perfectly flush along the seam, matching the pattern with the previous strip to determine how much it needs to be displaced.  Strip by strip, watch your room transform!

Quick note to the complexity you might encounter: If we all lived in smooth cylinders with no doors, windows, light fixtures, electrical boxes, dormers, etc., the steps listed above would truly be all there is to wallpapering.  A wallpaper job in that scenario could probably be finished in under an hour, and with no need for a professional.  Real rooms in real houses, however, contain all sorts of architectural intricacies – which look beautiful when finished, but also up the challenge for the wallpaper installer.

When your wallpaper installation has to accommodate a corner, protrusion, or obstruction, use the same logic you would when wrapping a present.  Measure the placement of any cuts carefully, and leave a margin that you can fold up against the obstruction to make a precision cut with the straight knife right at the corner.  Smooth the wallpaper thoroughly against the obstruction before making the final cuts, so that the seam is flawless.  Stay tuned for future blog entries about accommodating specific wallpaper challenges.

As long as you take enough time and care to ensure the quality of each cut and each strip placement, by following these steps you will eventually make it all the way around your room and back to the seam where you started.  Cut the last sheet of wallpaper slightly wider than it needs to be, and tuck the vertical margin underneath that first seam.  Voila!  You now have a finished wallpaper job that makes a beautiful, professional interior design statement.

Discussion of Design, Color Matching, and Spectrophotometry from a Northern Virginia Painting Contractor

Color is an amazing, and elusive, element of life.  Our vision doesn’t necessarily depend on it, and in some ways the information it brings us is superficial: it doesn’t tell us about more than the surface of an object.  Yet a world without color is undeniably lacking something, and even people who are relatively ambivalent about color are affected by it.

So the process of choosing the colors that you are going to paint your interior – essentially, the colors that you are going to live among – is one that merits serious consideration.  There is much to say about interior design and color matching; how to come up with a color scheme from scratch, how to predict how your colors will look when applied to a large architectural surface, etc.  But here we are going to focus on the art and technology of what to do when you start your project already knowing what colors you want.

There are three steps to getting your paint to turn out the perfect color.  The first step is to get a physical color sample.  The next step is to adjust that color sample so that it is perfectly suited for its intended project.  The final step is to use a spectrophotometer to create paint that will turn out that color.

Steps one and two provide the greatest challenge if you are trying to match a color from a natural landscape (i.e., the “color the sky is right now”).  Visual artists are well aware that the play of light and color in a natural landscape involves a huge array of hues, tones, and contrast, that can be depicted a variety of ways.  The blue of a sky in nature is luminescent – it is actually emitting light – and so translating it into an opaque color involves a substantial challenge.  It is also subtly and infinitely variable, so using one paint color to mimic it will likely fall flat.  In landscape paintings, artists use startling color juxtapositions – like throwing yellow into a blue sky – to achieve the desired results – but in interior design you have to achieve the effect you want a lot more simply.

So when you pick your color, you want to have your whole composition in mind, and you also want to consider, as always with picking architectural paint colors, how intense or overwhelming the colors will look if applied to large surfaces.  With colors from nature, this might take some adjustment.  Take a picture of the sky, get the photo printed, and then put it up on the wall and imagine how it will look when painted over the whole surface and when put together with your trim, accent, and furniture colors.  Trust your instincts: it may actually be a few shades lighter or grayer that you are truly looking for.

Next, you need to bring your color sample – along with any adjustments you might want to make to it – into a paint store.  Walk past the showroom area, past the hardware store, and go up to the service counter in the back.  Somewhere near the service counter, there should be a computer plugged into a small, shoebox-sized machine.  (Hopefully, there will also be a person back there who knows how to operate it!).  The machine is called a spectrophotometer, and what it does is analyze the color of whatever physical sample you submit to it and come up with a pigment formula for mixing that paint color.  The paint store employee can then take that code and plug it into their paint mixer, creating a bucket of paint in that color.

The spectrophotometer works by bouncing white light off of your sample and onto a light-sensitive detector, which analyzes the spectrum of reflected light and sends that information to the computer.  This method is roughly 90% effective; sometimes the color will be slightly off.  This is especially true when working from photos or magazines, which sometimes allow light through or have colors behind that bleed, when working with an extremely small sample (you want it to be at least the size of a quarter), or working with metallic colors.  So it is important to check your paint when you are finished to make sure you’ve come up with the right color.  Also, if you want to have the color be several shades lighter, darker, grayer, etc., than your sample, tell the store clerk before the paint gets mixed.  It is a wise idea to initially mix a small amount of paint, which you can take home and test on your surface, before committing to the full amount.

Winter Color Consultation Advice from Northern Virginia / Washington DC Painting Contractor

Pop quiz: what color makes a space warmer?  Black, or red?

If you answered “black”, then you have a good understanding of basic optical physics.  Dark colors absorb more heat than light colors, and therefore make a space physically warmer.

If you answered “red”, however, then you are tapping into a much more subtle, psychological concept of ‘temperature’.  In study after study, it has been discovered that the colors at the long end of the spectrum – red, orange, and yellow – seem “warmer” to the majority of people, while the colors at the opposite end of the spectrum – green, blue, indigo, and violet – seem “cooler”.  Although the hue doesn’t have any actual bearing on the physics of heat absorption, the psychological impact of a color’s ‘temperature’ can play an important role during the winter season.

Using warm colors in your interiors can go a long way toward warming up a space and raising spirits during the long, dark, cold months.  Red is a hot, feisty color that raises energy, encourages liveliness, and stimulates the appetite.  Orange is fun and wild, invoking playful scenes from the hot months of summer and similarly raising the energy in the room.  Yellow is sunny and cheerful, mimicking the expansive feel of a sunny day.  All three colors can slightly increase heart rate, making you feel warmer even when the physical temperature stays the same.

Where do these temperature associations come from?  They probably come from our ancestral experiences in nature.  Red, for example, is typically used as an attention-getting signal in the animal kingdom, whether the attention is sought in order to attract or to warn.  Many poisonous creatures are red – but so are delicious, edible berries.  Red (along with orange and yellow) is also the color of fire.  So the human instincts are designed to sit up and take notice around the color red – which feels exciting and therefore ‘warming’.  Orange has a similar set of natural associations, and yellow has an even more direct connection to feelings of heat: it is the color of warm sunlight.  Black, on the other hand, although it is physically the best heat absorber, is paradoxically associated with night, which has dark, mysterious, and cool connotations, rather than invoking warmth.

How can you use a warm color palette to warm your spirits?  Use warm colors to paint kitchens, dining rooms, sun rooms, and family rooms – social areas where people gather to eat, drink, talk, and while away the cold hours of winter.  Even on the coldest day, a warm color scheme will enliven your space and create a sensation of heat and comfort even on the darkest, coldest nights Old Man Winter has to offer.

Winter Painting Questions Answered by Washington, DC Area Contractor

Who really wonders how paint dries?  It seems like there couldn’t be a simpler – or more boring – process to understand.  The paint is wet, you give it some time, and then it dries.  End of story, right?

Wrong.

Painters and painting engineers who understand what it takes for paint to dry, deeply respect the process for its delicacy and intricacy.  Believe it or not, an understanding of how paint dries, and the interruptions that render it vulnerable, goes a long way toward understanding why you can’t paint in the winter.

First of all, paint does a lot more than just dry.  It forms a film, changing from a viscous liquid to a strong, extremely thin, solid.  While you may not think much of it, a paint film is actually a miraculous creation, standing straight up and adhering to the surface as a perfect uninterrupted whole.  The transition from the liquid in the can to the strong, durable film that we rely on for our architectural protection, is a carefully choreographed process.

Each type of paint – oil, alkyd, latex, epoxy, etc – forms a film in a different way.  For the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on latex paints, because they are becoming the most commonly used in the painting market.

Latex paint, though you can’t tell with the naked eye, is a curious mixture of tiny beads of plastic suspended in water.  The beads don’t mix with the water, because they are not water soluble – and they do not stick together when the paint is in its liquid form, because they are separated by a third component mixed into the paint: the surfactant.  The surfactant is a soapy oil that thinly coats each bead of plastic, making it bounce harmlessly off of any other beads of plastic that it may encounter while in suspension.

The “drying” – or, more accurately, “film forming” of latex paint is a play with three acts.  Act one: the water evaporates out of the film, leaving behind the surfactant-coated beads of plastic.  Act two: the surfactant, without the water to provide resistance, bleed together and run or evaporate out of the film.  Act three: the beads of plastic, now exposed to each other, bind together in a powerful chemical process known as coalescence.  This process is not reversible: once the beads of latex have bonded, they become inseparable, and a strong film is formed.

Here is what happens when you try to apply latex paint to a surface when it is cold, or wet (like undertaking an exterior paint job in the Washington, DC winter).  Act one gets skipped, because when it is too cold or to moist, the air is saturated and does not encourage evaporation.  So the water stays in the paint film.  The surfactants, since they are heavy and are now applied in a vertical film with constant gravity, start to bleed together and leach out of the paint job anyway.  Since the surfactants are leaching, the beads of plastic come in contact and start to bond – but since the water is still present, they bond in uneven clumps, and do not adhere to the substrate.  Ultimately, the film forms with wide unstable patches, and with inadequate adhesion, fails completely.

Due to our understanding of the physics of paint film formation, Blue Door Painters exterior painting season is from late March through early December: the times of year when you can at least hope the temperature in Washington DC will stay above 35 degrees and the humidity will stay low enough to encourage a successful paint job.

Tips for Staining Decks and Other Exterior Surfaces in Washington DC and Northern Virginia

Wood is a strong and beautiful organic building material with one key weakness: being organic, it is vulnerable to organic decay.  The properties of different kinds of wood are totally determined by the properties of the trees they were lumbered from.  Some trees, like cedar and redwood, have their own innate resistance to bacteria, fungus, and insects, but many of the common softwoods used for decks do not.  Pine, for example, which is a sturdy and easily lumbered variety of wood, lacks resistance.  When raw pine is exposed to the elements in an exterior environment, it will fall prey to decay within a couple years.

One classic solution to wood’s vulnerability is to paint or stain the wooden exterior surfaces, so that the wood takes on the waterproofing and element-resistance of the chemical paint and stain.  For the most vulnerable wood exteriors, however – like decks constructed from pine or douglas fir – providing surface protection is not sufficient to get long life out of a deck.  Pressure treatment is a technique that has become popular because it offers a deeper level of protection.

Pressure-treating involves bathing the lumber in preservative chemicals, and then subjecting the wood to intense pressure, so that the preservatives become deeply infused into the wood.  The most common chemicals used in pressure treatment are water-borne copper mixtures like chromate copper arsenate (that is the preservative that creates the familiar greenish tinge in exterior wood), alkaline copper quat, micronized copper quat, and copper azole.  With pressure-treated wood, chemical resistance is borne deep into the pores, lending added protection to the wood’s interior.

However, just because the wood is pressure-treated, does not mean that it does not need to be stained as well.  While the pressure treatment system is remarkably thorough, some spots will inevitably be missed, and the rot that sets in will slowly but steadily decrease the life of your deck.  Staining pressure-treated wood can both extend the life and amplify the beauty of your exterior deck landscape.

The catch is, you can’t do it immediately.  Because you can’t do it while the wood is still wet.  Even when the wood is bought freshly from the store on a sunny day, if it is pressure-treated, you should assume that it is wet.  This is because pressure treating by itself makes wood wet.  The water that carries the preservative chemicals into the wood is driven in so deeply that it takes 30-60 days to dry fully – the exact drying time determined by the temperature and humidity.

Staining pressure-treated wood while it is still internally wet from the pressure-treatment process is one of the critical mistakes that leads to stain and paint failure on exterior surfaces.  The moisture pushes out against the film or stain, forming bubbles in the coating, and the moisture locked into the wood encourages mold to grow, counteracting the very purpose of the preservatives and stain.

So the moral of the story: YES, go ahead and stain your pressure-treated deck (or fence!) – but wait 30-60 days first.

Color Contouring: The Hot New Painting and Remodeling Strategy for Enhancing Exterior Curb Appeal

The little house on Robin Road was what one keenly perceptive open-house visitor called “an architectural disaster”.  The bathrooms were small, the eaves of the Cape Cod sloped so steeply that both upstairs bedrooms felt cramped – and worse yet, the house had barely any closets.  There was also some ambiguity about which was the front door; one opened to the side of the house, up an awkwardly steep staircase and walkway, while the other required opening the gate at the top of the driveway and walking across the deck.  Yet the home sold, at the end of a tight bidding war, for $50,000 more than it was listed.

The real estate team who sold the house was a dynamic pair who specialized in creative, aggressive ‘staging’.  ‘Staging’ means the setting up of a house for pre-sale display.  This real estate team showed up at the little Cape Cod the week before it went on the market armed with several thousand dollars worth of landscaping and painting supplies, and the delighted homeowners watched as that initial several thousand returned them fifty upon the final sale.

Why were they so effective?  Because they focused on curb appeal.  By repainting and landscaping the home’s exterior, they made the little Cape Cod look positively enchanting when viewed from the road.  The blooming azaleas and cherry trees went a long way, but the bulk of the burden of the home’s curb appeal was carried by the paint job.

Repainting an exterior is the surest way to achieve curb appeal.  A new paint job makes a surface look exceptionally clean, lending the impression that the building is sturdy and well-kept.  Also, the newly perfected technique of color contouring can contribute to making a home look bigger, more harmonious, and better constructed; three of the most important characteristics determining curb appeal.

Color contouring is based on the simple optical principle that light-colored objects look bigger, lighter, and more in the background, while dark-colored objects look smaller, heavier, and pop out into the foreground.  Using this simple rule, a clever designer can essentially reshape your house with a new paint job, playing up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses to maximize your curb appeal.  Follow the simple steps below for color contouring, and your house could gain as much as $50,000 in value from its curb appeal alone.

 Color Contouring Tips:

1. Paint lower sections of your architecture darker than higher sections.  Darker sections seem heavier, so it seems more stable to the eye to have them on the bottom, not vice-versa.

2. Paint spaces that you want to expand in slightly lighter colors than spaces that you want to shrink.  If you have mismatched dormers, for example, painting the smaller one slightly lighter will help balance them visually

3. Pick a light shade for your main color.  Light colors make surfaces look larger and more spacious, and in almost every case, the curb appeal is improved when a house looks larger.

4. Paint the structural details of your architecture (window trim, cornices, etc) in darker colors to make them stand out.  Emphasizing structural features makes your house look more sturdy.

5. Paint your shutters in a lighter color.  Lightly colored shutters will make your windows look bigger, which will increase curb appeal.

Painting tips for doing it yourself . . . or checking up on your painter/contractor
Washington DC and Northern VA

The short answer to this question is short indeed.
Yes.
You should pretty much always use a primer (or “prime coat”) for any interior or exterior painting project.

A “primer”, or “prime coat” – for those who do not know – is the first coat of paint in a multi-layer paint system.  It’s the layer of paint that is applied directly to the surface that you want to refinish, and it goes underneath at least one other layer of paint, which is known as the “topcoat”.  Primers and topcoats are usually sold separately (although there are brands of paint which claim to do both), and they have subtly different physical and chemical properties.

Unlike the topcoat, which gives the paint its final look, feel, and resistance to the elements, the primer coat plays a structural role, rather than an aesthetic one.  The primary job of the prime coat isn’t to look nice; it is to adhere powerfully to the wall or ceiling, creating the ideal surface for the topcoat to stick to.

See, painting, when you break it down, is the art of getting a substance (the paint) to stick to a surface (your wall) in a thin, strong film, defying the laws of gravity.  Chemists and engineers have put years of their lives and millions of dollars into designing the substances that will do this best – and yet failure to adhere to the substrate (i.e., stick to the wall), is still the number one overall cause of paint failure, and probably always will be.  That’s because paint is designed with the ‘perfect surface’ in mind – but the surfaces that exist in our homes and offices are in reality very far from that perfect surface.  Our real-life surfaces are old, worn out, flaking, chipping, chalking, full of too much moisture, subject to temperature and humidity changes . . . in short, forever in the process of falling apart.  A good paint job can check that progress – but only if the paint can overcome the imperfections that already exist in the surface and really stick to it.

A primer is designed to do just that.  A good primer will be engineered to stick to the surface and hide whatever is on it – and that goal will be prioritized over anything else.  And believe it or not, paint is usually engineered as a balance between multiple goals: brightest color, strongest UV protection, best mildew resistance, longest durability, lowest VOC content . . . the list goes on and on.  You will want to pick a topcoat that excels in many of those categories – but let your prime coat just do its one job as well as it possibly can.

There are brands of paint out there (Duration by Sherwin Williams is a good example) that claim to be “one coat only”, and therefore not need a primer.  Many of these paints are very high quality indeed – and cost top dollar as well.  Our take on high-end no-prime paints: yes, you do get what you pay for when it comes to paint, and those top-dollar paints are indeed of the highest possible quality.  They are designed to perform well in all the ways you would want out of any paint film, primer or topcoat.  But for any less-than-ideal surface (raw and unpainted material, old and flaky existing paint job  – and again, in our experience, most surfaces are less than ideal), we would still recommend throwing a prime coat underneath.  A coat of Duration can fail on an unstable surface, too.  So why risk it?  Just pick the type of primer that matches your substrate, go for a trustworthy but slightly less designer topcoat, and be on your way!

Blue Door Painters Gets You Ready for Washington, DC’s Spookiest Evening

With the trees turning colors, the lively pumpkin patches, and all the fun decorations populating local drugstores and neighborhood stoops, Halloween is the spookiest – and, for many in Washington, DC, the most fun – day of the year.  In this entry, Blue Door Painters offers advice on how to prepare your exterior for the pinnacle of autumn festivities – and how to get your home back to normal when the dust settles and the monsters curl up into their winter hibernation.

Many neighborhoods in Northern Virginia, Washington, DC, and Montgomery County, Maryland, display great pride in setting up their front yards for the hordes of children who come out to trick-or-treat on Halloween evening.  It can be the perfect opportunity to show off your exterior; some new landscaping and a spruced-up deck or exterior paint job looks great highlighted by a couple of well-carved pumpkins.  This is a great season to get some work done on your exterior, as well.  The spring and summer rush is over so us contractors are a little less swamped, and the next six weeks are your last opportunity before the weather turns unfavorable.

Here are some suggestions for work to get done on your exterior in mid – to late October:

1) Pressure-washing.  Before the leaves start falling in earnest, pressure washing your deck, fence, or exterior siding can give your outdoor space some sparkle that will lend dignity to all of the upcoming seasonal festivities.  Follow up the pressure-washing with a weatherproof stain and/or sealant, and you will also give your exterior some extra protection from the Washington, DC winter weather.  A freshly stained deck can take some spilled candy, candle wax, and pumpkin rind, no problem!

2) Staining/Sealing.  As mentioned above, following a good pressure wash, staining and sealing is a great way to beautify your outdoor space, and give it weatherproofing for the hard months to come.  Try picking rich, warm stain colors that harmonize with the turning trees in your neighborhood – and listen to your neighbors ooh and ahh when the leaves start really falling in November!

3) Exterior Painting.  A fresh paint job, whether it is of the entire exterior, or just some lively trim, is a great way to give your home autumn curb appeal – and even a new look, if you’re ready for it!  You would be surprised how much a simple color change on the trim around your windows and doors can change the look and feel of your front yard.  Even if you aren’t ready for a color change, freshening up the paint makes your home look newer and cleaner (vital for anyone trying to rent or sell during the autumn months), and with all the attention your spooky decorations are going to bring, that extra sparkle will really count!

4) Landscaping.  You don’t want to be hanging your decorations up on tangled trees or putting graves on a disheveled lawn (unless, of course, you’re going for that look).  Get your landscaping freshened up – lawn mowed, fall plants securely planted, mulch and gravel replaced – and your home will not only look nicer, it will be better prepared for both the trick-or-treaters, and the winter weather.

So give us a call if you want some help making your exterior worthy of the attention it’s going to get this Halloween – and don’t forget to buy your candy, carve your pumpkins, and turn your outdoor lights on!

 

 

 

Blue Door Painters explores incorporating exotic styles into city life.

The home was a rustic woodland paradise.  Surrounded by forest and framed by a tidy garden and a liberal swath of hardscaping, the house showcased wood in its most gloriously natural state.  The siding on the outside was made of cedar, cut into a log-shaped veneer that sloughed off rain without requiring mortar.  Indoors, whole peeled logs from local pines supported the ceiling on capable shoulders, while smaller logs framed the stairs, railing, and balcony.  The floor and walls were paneled in hardwood.  Everything, inside and out, was glossy with protective varnish and glowing with a warm amber-colored stain.  The omnipresent honey-brown wood tones, paired with authentic bearskin rugs, animal mounts (above the fireplace, an intimidatingly massive moose), and beautiful foliage-detail artwork completed the hunting lodge ambience: a perfect mixture of grand and welcoming.

Go back 250 years, and you might have found this home (or rather, its historic equivalent – coatings technologies in the 1700s hadn’t quite caught up) right here in the heart of Washington, DC.  Before the region was called upon to serve as the nation’s capitol, wealthy landowners took advantage of the rich silt and dense forest around the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers to farm and hunt in large estates adjacent to the small towns of Georgetown and Alexandria.  Today, of course, real estate in the area has taken on a very different style, conforming to the practical and aesthetic pressures of being both a bustling metropolis and the political seat of the United States.  The home described and depicted above is a real place – located in rural Pennsylvania.  But while full-on hunting lodge decor might now be out of place in modern DC, many of the creative techniques for working with wood showcased by the rustic style have a lot to offer the resourceful urban designer.  Here are two ideas:

1. Log-style cedar siding.  Cedar, of all the species of wood on the market, is one of the most naturally rot-resistant, durable, and low-maintenance.  The extra money spent to purchase cedar is quickly returned by its lack of maintenance. There are two kinds of cedar: Western Red Cedar and Northern White Cedar.  The two are comparably rot resistant and durable, varying primarily in cost and color (Western Red Cedar has a beautiful reddish tone which can be easily enhanced and preserved with stain).  However, when purchasing Western Red Cedar siding or decking, make sure you inquire about the percentage of heartwood included in your lumber.  Due to forestry concerns, modern Red Cedar is often harvested young, before it has had a chance to develop a critical mass of mature heartwood.  While it is noble to stop encroachment on old-growth forests, it is important to know that the sapwood comprising the bulk of young cedar trees is actually NOT rot resistant.  So you may find yourself paying cedar prices for a siding product that isn’t much more resilient than untreated pine.  An excellent solution to this quandary is to use the more locally available Northern White Cedar and invest in an extra coat of stain to achieve the perfect glowing color.

The log-style siding on this Pennsylvania home is a different shape than traditional lap or tongue and groove siding; it creates the visual effect of a log cabin while allowing for conventional frame construction.  In many of the more tightly clustered urban neighborhoods, a home finished entirely with log-style wood siding may seem jarringly out of place – but using this rustic style as an accent; on a dormer or gable, or in conjunction with brick or stone, can add a lively touch of nature that will make your home look sturdy and romantic, and enhance your curb appeal.  Cedar siding can be stained in many colors to match your desired palette – including a solid color stain if you want the Victorian effect of painted wood.  If you are lucky enough to live in one of the more sprawling neighborhoods of areas like McLean, VA, or Potomac, MD, you can go all-in with the log cabin style if you want to; it will enhance the image of your home as a woodland retreat, and accordingly make your property seem larger.

2. Whole skinned logs.  Whether used for interior or exterior, construction or decoration, whole logs create a very powerful rustic effect.  Most commonly available in White Pine or Cedar (although you can look into other species specifically available around Washington, DC), whole logs can be used as urban accents that are both daring and charming.  Try building a deck with whole logs as the outer frame, or using whole logs to frame your door or windows.  Or, if you are particularly ambitious, you might consider a tudor-style addition, with whole logs as structurally significant portions of the construction (they certainly are strong enough; their main downside is the extra work required to accommodate the unusual shape).

On the interior, whole logs are stunning as supports for a high, peaked ceiling or open-air staircase.  They are also one of the more attractive options for a freestanding structural support (read: pole in the middle of your basement).  Trimming an interior with whole logs (or whole long veneer siding, which is also available) can dramatically change the tone of an interior with very little effort.  Pairing the logs’ natural beauty with another rustic feature, like a fireplace or wood stove, can make any room look hunting lodge cozy, right in the middle of the city!