Denver Square Facelift Recap
Gutters, Windows, and Paint
I’m still struck when I see this photo of how good the lawn looks! But there may have been some unanticipated fertilizer seeping into this soil . . . We had our sewer lines scoped as a separate inspection item during the sale on the advice of our wonderful real estate agent, Heather Zaidel, and the old clay pipes were completely broken. Thankfully the previous owners replaced them before we moved in, but they also told us they were fine as is if we snaked them every six months. . . Hence the beautiful green lawn.
From afar, this house looks great! Up close, the paint was peeling off everything, the gutters were a gloopy mess, the storm windows were old and grimy and didn’t stay open, the original windows had gloopy stain and flaking lead paint, the storm door was broken, and the front door had a sticky residue from someone’s attempt to strip its surface.
Part of our soffit was rotting out from a gutter issue and because the paint on the gutters was dull and gloopy, exchanging the gutters was a no brainer. We chose black, and I love the way they outline the house. This was our only fast and completely seamless project. That being said, our french drains weren’t replaced but will be with our backyard remodel.
I have a whole post on our window replacement. I chose black for the window frames to complement the gutters and act as a nice outline. The two decorative windows at the front of the house that we didn’t replace we had painted black as well.
The paint color was a trickier decision. Part of me really really wanted to paint the now-white areas a dusky blue.
Something about the blue/red combination is really appealing to me. But there are so many Victorian Era homes in our neighborhood and the vast majority have colorful trim work—ah colorful Colorado. I’m not kidding, one across the street from us has yellow and purple trim, there’s a row of Denver Squares in LoHi on 32nd Ave between Bryant and Alcott and not a single one has white trim. Because I was worried about making a terrible mistake and because my two favorite brick houses in our neighborhood had off-white trim, we went the classic route.
I had trouble deciding what kind of white to go with. So many of the houses that are white in our neighborhood look too white and dated or run-down because of that. Choosing an outdoor paint color is wildly different than choosing a color for indoors. It’s always in direct sunlight, so it will look so much brighter than the paint will inside your home.
For example, Simply White, the color on the walls in our home is the second swatch down on the column above and it looks stark with none of the warm undertones it has indoors under the soft glow of 2700K lights. If you’ve read my paint post, you know how wary I am of gray, but I realized that my off-white color choice needed to have gray undertones rather than yellow undertones to not look dirty in the Denver Snow.
This project did not go smoothly. The painting company I chose ensured me that even though I wasn’t paying for a full restoration, they’d sand and scrape any flaking paint so that the new paint wouldn’t be compromised. After all, one day we plan to replace our porch columns and railing, but until then we want the wood protected. When I walked around the house I noticed that they didn’t prime any surfaces, they didn’t clean or scrape anything, and their tape wasn’t the correct kind of tape to secure to brick.
I immediately said something to them. The head painter ensured me that he was priming, but the paint can he showed me was actually an interior paint in the color Accessible Beige. It was not a primer and it wasn’t suitable for exterior use. I had to hassle them until they worked to smooth out the surfaces and actually prime the areas. I ended up buying a ton of Frog Tape with applicators and showing them how to caulk the tape to protect the brick. As I had feared when the paint crew showed up, they were using the pre-existing paint splatter on the house as an excuse not to be careful about avoiding our brick. They even got paint on our brand new windows.
If you’re having all or part of the outside of your house painted and there are particular areas you don’t want painted (the gutters, the windows, the doors), go outside while the project is being done. You don’t have to feel awkward about watching people work on your house. No one cares about your house the way that you do, and they are much more likely to do the work correctly with an audience. Take pictures of anything you see that you don’t like. If I didn’t have that picture above of white paint crossing on top of the tape onto the brick, it would have been very difficult for me to prove what I was telling the manager at the company.
In the end it all worked out, and it looks 100 times better than it did before, but it took a lot of effort to get the workmanship I’d expected. Harrison was born two weeks later. I actually think we could have gone slightly darker with the color, but without seeing actual paint samples, it would have been too hard for me to be certain. I am really happy with the way the white paint looks, and one day I’d love to add a Dentil Molding under the Soffit, and maybe we will even try a dusky blue.
I talk all about the siding at the back of the house in my post about the backyard renovation. But there are a couple of interesting things about this part of the house. It used to be a sleeping porch. The long beam that extends from the mudroom windows to the laundry room windows is a single piece of wood, and it’s water damaged but can’t easily be removed. To protect it, we had our window guys cap it int he same metal hey sued to frame the outside of the windows.
You’ll also notice the white on the bricks. That’s not because it’s a different style of brick, that’s because someone used mortar to try to tuck point the loose bricks and fill in the cracks and gaps. This is absolutely the incorrect material to use for that job. You can see from the picture below that our tuck pointer’s were able to acid wash off a lot of that mortar, but I still wanted a more uniform look, at least until we had a more permanent fix.
I went to Home Depot and bought a cement stain and had the stain tinted brick-red, as close as I could get it to the color of our house. Then brick-by-brick I painted them, and I think it looks a lot better. Ryan thinks we should do the whole house, but I have a hard time believing we will be able to find a contractor who would do it and actually do it well. It’s tricky to paint inside the lines with the thin cement stain.
