The Historic District

We continue on the one room a year plan. Rebuilding windows and repainting.

Other than the front door sidelites I think I have now rebuilt every window that needs it!!!! And I confirmed that 2 year old Sarco still works

A couple of these windows have soft spots on the sill but its getting late in the year so that will have to wait for next year. I'll take the storm windows off and work on them from outside in the spring.









The windows I have been working on in the evenings since September. The actual painting of the room was a 4 day marathon... (ceiling, trim, walls) ... that took 4 days because halfway though the boss decided that the chosen wall color wasn't growing on her.

So we did it all again.


In retrospect if we had to do it all over we would have changed the trim color and gone for a more period look with white drywall - but I thought I wasn't going to have to paint all the trim (wrong). If we REALLY could do what we wanted with this room we would gut it, box in the post, move the chair rail down to the windowsill where it belongs and fix that asymmetrical fireplace surround - but that's a project for another age.

a job well done! how satisfying when all is said and done that the work was done with all good intentions and the results are spectacular....
sit back and enjoy....at least for a while anyway......
....jade

LOVE the outcome!!! Yep and I feel for you with the overpainting. I did my kitchen (again) BUT finally nailed the color to what I wanted the very first time and missed the mark by a few shades.
The hallway which connects to the kitchen... one wall got 4 different color changes... dk sage green to lt sage green (both were too much between the kitchen and the hall), soft yellow which looked too much like lemon curd so no one liked it,to a soft golden straw color... NAILED IT!

Color can be all the difference between harmony and a bad mood.

it looks super nice! if you'd rather a different shade that's not too hard once the walls are flat and nice.

Looking good, jharkin.

Wackyshack wrote:{snip}Color can be all the difference between harmony and a bad mood.

Spot on way to describe color use.

That looks great Jeremy - could you share the names of those two colors? They work together really well.

Since it's now been a couple months since you shared, how do you feel now about the room?

Sorry Ive been away so long folks, lots happened over the winter and spring and I didn't have much time for the house.


We did finally get the rest of the exterior repainted to match the garage (recall last year a tree fell on it and insurance paid for a new roof and paint). Same siding color as it used to be but we changed the trim. Probably not a historically correct scheme but we really like the result - thoughts?

I hired this one out as well, crew of 4 guys did it in a bit over a week, would have taken me 6 months I bet...

Sara wrote:That looks great Jeremy - could you share the names of those two colors? They work together really well.

Since it's now been a couple months since you shared, how do you feel now about the room?

Sorry i lost track... just asked the better half to remind me, its HC-171 Wickham Gray and the trim is a bright white called Marscapone. Both from the Ben Moore color catalog.

Really nice color combination, Jeremy.

I'm going out on a limb saying this but I feel "historically accurate" colors are those that were possible at the time of the house's construction. Considering all the variants of paint mixing and individual preference, I submit that houses were painted the color the owner wanted, as long as the color was technically possible, economically feasible and available. I couldn't say if that's the case with the colors you've chosen for your house, but it sure looks good.

Hey James... its not so much the color itself, its the contrasting trim.... Every old house book I have says that houses where typically monochrome up until the Greek Revival period or later. All the historic houses in Newport and most of the museum houses at Sturbridge Village and Strawberry Banke are done that way.

We just really wanted to change the trim and make the house "pop" a bit, at the risk of using worn out HGTV terminology.


The colors themselves are both from the BenMoore historic pallete.... probably more like mid-19th century colors but I've seen similar shades on Federal era pallets in the California paints catalog.


BTW the colors are Winthrop Peach on the siding and Montgomery white on the trim if anyone is curious. The peach was first put up at least two owners back because it matches that dogwood out front that flowers bright pink in May... we are known as "that little pink house on the corner" around town....