Slip Slop Slap

What's the next logical step in our stair-building and fence-building projects? Other than perhaps an actual railing for the stairs?

Sunscreen?

In a way, yes! It's a house's version of sunscreen. Paint!

But that means it's time to deal with my serial indecision when it comes to choosing paint colours yet again. What's more, it's going to be grey again!

The question is...yet again... which grey?

Of course this decision wasn't just about the stairs and the fence, but about the entire colour scheme for the outside of the house, since obviously the stairs and the fence need to match it. There was a lot more riding on this decision than just the task at hand. Great! That makes it easier to be decisive!

So I got every single grey-ish paint chip I could find from Bunnings, eliminated the ones I definitely didn't like, and taped the rest up near the front door.

Taping all of those samples up on the wall was incredibly helpful, since it made me realise that the grey paint chips that looked quite dark inside actually showed up pretty light-coloured outside with the morning sun shining on them. I selected the darker non-blue-looking options (except the really dark one on the top left which is actually the colour we painted the office - Taubmans' Inverness), and took them with me.

First things first, we had to go through the usual pre-painting pattern. Sanding, and then undercoating the stairs and the fence. Sigh.

Four hours after starting the undercoat, Daniel was done with the fence, and I was done with the stairs.

The undercoat is blindingly white in the morning sun!!

We let it sit like this for a full week, to harden up nicely before we added coats of colour.

But that required me to actually decide on a colour! Hmm.

I discovered recently that a friend's brother actually works for Wattyl Paints, so I went to see him with my samples to make a decision and get some paint. I had decided that I wanted to keep things simple and crisp with the colours for the outside of the house, so just needed to find a grey for the walls, and a white for the trim colour.

After much dithering on my part (which was probably very annoying for the poor guy), we decided on Taubmans' Gunnard, the darkest grey paint chip I'd brought with me. And to ensure that the white we chose would match it nicely, we decided to tint the white with a very small fraction of the Gunnard grey tint, so it was only just off-white, but off-white in the right direction (i.e. not too yellow or blue or brown or anything except Gunnard-like).

And so we got to work.

And we painted and painted and painted and painted.

Have I mentioned before that I wouldn't be sorry not to see a paintbrush again? No surely not.

Not when the finished product looks like this!

Needless to say, the white and the grey match each other very well!

And doesn't the fence look amazing?

This...

Compared with this.

And these were the stairs.

And now they look like this. Crisp and clean! Shame about the still-yellow house. We'll get to that eventually.

Sometimes I wonder how it's become so easy for me to cover up beautiful timber with paint.

But then it's usually so worth it!

One baby step at a time we're making our way toward a completed staircase (and front fence)! As always though, there's still a way to go! A handrail would be handy...