Paint ball

Paint.

No one ever told me that the hardest thing I'd ever encounter in married life would be choosing a paint color, together. Sickness or health, poverty or wealth...cake. Paint? A whole other ballgame as far as I'm concerned.

So our old siding was a creamy yellow-y color. First hitch in this whole one-flesh, one-color debacle was learning that Will had always "hated" what I considered to be the most attractive part of our somewhat dingy-looking exterior. Yellow-y creamy color=out.

So we tried a bunch of other yellows. And we hated them all. Paint hyperbole was everywhere:

Will: "I can't think of a single nice thing to say about either of those colors."

Colleen: "That reminds me of some putrid yellow vomit from 1970."

Yellow was going to break us. So, we said goodbye and moved on to green. Decided not to go green. Moved on and arrived at what had always secretly been my dream color...

(drum roll)

Blue!!!! (or, more specifically, Benjamin Moore HC [Historical Color]-136 Waterbury Green)

Dear Mom: Please don't be disappointed. I know you really wanted us to stick with yellow. So did we. But after taking a long, hard look at our priorities, we decided to keep the marriage and ditch the yellow. We're feeling blue, and we couldn't be happier about it. 

Our favorite thing about this color is that it reminds us of the cottage we stayed in on the beach in South Haven, MI (ok, so we stayed in the brown cabin behind the pretty blue cottage house, but that's a minor detail). It just makes us want to relax, slow down, and enjoy where we are. Which we'll get to after this whole house remodel thing.

In other remodeling news, Duke finally buried this thing (i.e. electrical line):

And now we have this nice, jump-out-of-the-top window-during-a-fire-worry-free-because-there-is-no-electrical-line-in-your-way wall:

Oh, and remember our roofless porch?

Now we have this:

We're pretty stoked with our new front porch roof (and the new front door and last replacement window on the left). It looks like this from underneath, and will eventually be covered with stained beaded board:

Ahh, progress. Thank the Lord.

Next up: Upstairs windows, lots of painting (and choosing a trim color, God help us!), more siding, and gutters.