All Around The Mulberry House

The redo project started in April. It was originally planned as a three month, three stage project. We are now working on six months, and are up to stage seven….and we still aren’t quite done.

We wanted to go with all historical colors, so we chose to use California Paints. California Paints carries a line of Historic Colors of America that we just fell in love with. They have the colors organized by time frame making it easy to select the appropriate colors.

Let’s start with the outside. Ho hum.  Our house has been white for over 100 years. We find white to be boring, and honestly, it is not historical to the time frame of our home. The color needed to be changed. So we hit the color palettes from California Paints. It was a tough decision. There are so many beautiful color choices. We narrowed it down to three, and then two, and then the final one. There are three sections to the house, so we took great care in coming up with a color scheme that would not only look great, but also be true to the age of the home.

Starting with the cape, which was built in about 1792, we chose Portobello. It is a deep rich mushroom color, and it’s beautiful.

The Portobello also compliments the Muted Mulberry that we chose for the main house, which was built in 1822. We used the Portobello for the trim of the main house as well.

The front door of the main house, which is the original door,  was stripped of about ten layers of color. With lots of stripper, sanding, and lots of sore muscles, it took two weeks to get it down to the natural beauty that it is now. For this door, we chose to just use linseed oil. The linseed oil brings out the old beauty of the wood.

The other doors in the house are Shaker Red, which is the perfect compliment to both the Portobello and the Muted Mulberry.

The final outside project done. Complete with a few new bushes.
We love it. What about you?