About Those Paint Colors, Again...

Painting a home is not on the top of my list of fun-filled things to do on your day off. But hopefully the results are worth it. Maybe you can find ways to make it seem fun (or maybe I should say "more bearable") like putting on the atomic era music while you work to make the time pass quicker.

While I'm scraping and sanding and busting my knuckles by prying loose paint from the woodwork, I like to see what colors were used before on the family home, kind of how an arborist/climatologist/historian may use tree rings to date with, maybe. You get the idea.

A week ago I replaced the outside sheathing on the back storeroom door, and was wondering about the choice of color appropriate to the time when the house was still new. Here's what I found under the thick peels of shredded paint:

Among the oldest paint layers on the door was a rich dark red, which I vaguely remember when I was a real youngin' (you can see that in the second photo, to the left).

The door sill also had traces of the red layer, and under that a very rockin' aqua color (top and bottom photos) . Just like the salmon pink I found when restoring the bathroom, the old ranch home originally wore some bright colors, ones I wouldn't have imagined from the beige exterior seen in old photos. I like this. In fact I'll be painting the doors back to this color, thanks to my bit of detective work.