It wasn't that long ago that we painted our house a shade of medium shade of grey, painting over our all peach house. We chose a medium-light grey and painted our house ourselves a few months before I began blogging way back in 2009, I never wrote down the color of the paint since we had leftover paint in the garage. You can read more about our painting process

. Now that the exterior siding of our house is done, its time to choose paint colors. Hasani and I both decided we love our house grey but what colors?

Over the past few months I've collected a ton of grey paint swatches for our interior but none for our exterior go figure. Since it was crunch time Hasani and I headed to Home Depot to check out paint colors and within a few minutes narrowed it down to three shades of grey. We went from light grey to dark grey.....to give an us idea what each color would look like on our exterior. Here's a reminder of our house currently

looks

We painted decided to paint two spots on our homes exterior, because they both get different lighting depending on how the sun is hitting our house. Along with three paint samples I bought three cheapo sponge paint bushes great for one time use and cheap enough that its no biggie to toss them after use. I painted each color on our homes siding then held up the paint sample next to painted section snapped a picture so we could remember what paint color we used.

Brand: Behr Color: Pier

Brand: Berh Color: Classic Silver

Brand Behr Color: Elephant Skin

The three shades from top to bottom: Pier, Classic Silver & Elephant Skin

We took a few minutes for the paint to dry to decide on what color we didn't like, then choose the color we did. Within minutes we both agreed Classic Silver had way to many blue undertones for our taste and just look flat and too light.

We went back and forth over between Elephant Skin and Pier. Hasani preferred Elephant Skin, I liked

it, but it reminded me of a 'play it safe color' and not as grey as I would have liked.

I really liked how Pier was a deeper, richer color than Elephant Skin. We stepped back and looked at the colors with our new roof in view then both agreed that Pier was the winner!

We are painting the whole house body Pier color matched at Sherwin Williams, the brand our painter prefers and painting our door/window trim and edge boards a crisp clean creamy white to match our new seamless gutters. Our house is being painted today! Weather permitting, we've had funky weather the past week of so and our home was supposed to get painted paint last week. I can't wait to see how our home looks once its all painted!

What color did you like best? What is your favorite house color? In addition to grey, I've always liked white colonial style houses with bright red doors!

Just a few days ago I shared our first official tour of house with the drywall up, read more about home tour

here

. Since sharing our tour, the drywall was been completely tapped and textured.

case your a new reader to my blog, we lost the majority of our belongings and house due to a fire in July 2012 you can read more about the fire

here

. We are now in the re-building stage and very grateful

to rebuild our home

One thing I loved about our old walls was the texture, not rough not too smooth just right so we went that route again the finish is called imperfect smooth. It fits perfectly with our homes age. After the drywall was completed it was time to address our hardwood floors, just barely two years ago we refinished our floors DIY Style, read more about how we did our floors

here

We were hopeful that could 'save' some of the original hardwoods seam in new hardwood floors in our house as needed. It was really important that our new unfinished hardwoods were the same size and type of wood, as or existing ones so everything would be consistent and seamless.

The 'flooring guys'

, installed new unfinished matching hardwoods in our kitchen & dining room, portions of our living room, hallways and bedrooms. The flooring guys did an amazing job of matching our old hardwoods with our new hardwoods.

Our new unfinished oak hardwoods came all the way from Kentucky, from a company called

Lebanon Oak Flooring

. The company has been in business since the late 1800's. I love that our flooring comes from a company that's been around for a really really long time and has a history, just like our original hardwood flooring.

When we refinished our hardwood floors almost two years ago we with the Minwax color

Early American

. We were pretty certain would go use the same color stain again, until we started looking at the color swatches.

This time around Hasani was really drawn to Dark Walnut, but I really liked Jacobean The only way to truly know which color will look best on your floors, is to test the stain on your hardwoods, because the sample swatch might look completely different on your floors depending on your wood, age of type etc. If you follow me on Instagram then your spoiled and got a sneak peak at the stain colors we were considering. My user name on Instragram is Mrsclh...hope to see you on there!

Dark Walnut

: On our floors dark walnut was much lighter and had reddish brown undertones. In the sample swatch the color look more brown and showed less grain detail.

Jacobean

: Our on floors was a nice deep brown but not too dark and showed all the grain variations in our wo

od the showed a range of colors from light to dark.

In the picture you can see how the stain isn't as dark on our hardwoods as it is on the swatch.

We looked at both colors side by side in natural light and full sunlight with the front door open & closed. We both agreed we loved how Jacobean looked, it showed all the pretty variations of the wood grain deeper and lighter in some areas.

That's one the beauties of staining wood, seeing all the color variations and not getting one solid flat color. Yet the overall colors will look consistent

. After selecting our stain color, the 'floor guys' came back the next day to apply the stain. I'll share more details of the staining process the floors professional use & our floors of course!

What stain colors do you like on hardwoods, lighter or darker? What to you think of the stain we choose?