Yup. You read that right. Judge all you want. Send up some prayers. Talk trash to all of your friends — but we’re having our vinyl siding painted today. And to reference our queen Hannah B (from The Bachelorette), Jesus still loves us.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about two big changes we’ve made to the front of our house so far. As much charm and character as the duck added to the front of our house, it just wasn’t us. So, we rebranded, and it now resides in the woodshop out back. We were surprised at how easy it came down — it was seriously hanging from the wood planking by two heavy duty hooks.

We think that our little town will truly mark the day we took the duck down as a day in American history. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but it did feel a bit nostalgic. People knew this house because of the duck. We were the house with the duck. They loved the duck. They miss (and ask about) the duck.

And once the duck was down, we realized pretty quickly that we’d have to figure something out for the wood planking underneath. The dirt spot where the duck once sat never really went away, even after we power washed it. Knowing that our painter was coming soon, we knew we needed to move quickly. So, with the help of Laryssa’s family, we used some siding from the back of our house to completely patch over where the duck and wood planking use to be – an end of an era, if you will.

Moving onto the exciting stuff; paint colors! For a long time, we have dreamed about what this house would like painted a dark blue with bright white trim. In fact, this is actually a quick sketch that Alan put together on his iPhone way before we closed on the house.

Our original inspiration came from another Michigan blog that we’ve followed for a few years now called For Richard or Poorer. The owners painted their first house a beautiful shade of dark blue, which is shown below. When we were searching for our right shade, we thought it would be as easy as looking through their blog posts or sending them a DM. Not quite. Turns out the Sherwin Williams changes and updates their paint colors from time to time, and the paint swatch they used no longer exists. You can read about their paint color difficulties here.

Once we read that there really was no longer a paint color for their house, we went on our adventure to find one to match. I mean, it couldn’t be that difficult. WRONG. We actually had a hell of a time finding the perfect shade of paint we wanted for our house. When we first ventured to Sherwin Williams to look at colors, we left the store with two paint samples, and we were positive that one of them was the perfect color. In fact, the paint in the picture below was the color we thought was absolutely “it” when we left the store. WRONG.

To our defense, it looked absolutely beautiful underneath the store lighting, and we knew when we painted it on our siding, it would be meant to be. WRONG. Our research continued, and by the end of it, we had tried more than eight different colors on the side of our house.

The winner? Chimney by Behr (actually color matched to Sherwin Williams VinylSafe). It’s dark, it has hints of blue, it isn’t too bright, and we love it.

So, here we are today, July 24, 2019, sitting on pins and needles as the painter and his staff start painting the vinyl siding. We have our fingers crossed that we picked the right color and that we’re not going to regret this. Stay tuned – we’re hoping to do another post tonight with updated photos.

Alan + Laryssa