Painted shutters

Adam and I have slowly been trying to improve our home's curb appeal (it turns out peeling windows and beat up shutters don't give a house that "cared for" look). For reasons that probably involved some discounted green paint, the previous owner started painting the exterior...

and then stopped (apparently it wasn't until they got to the shutters that they realized the colour didn't work).

So we pressure washed the siding and painted over the green paint...with more green paint. It's actually called "Dark as Night", and it's an example of why you should never ever buy paint without seeing the colour in person. I chose the colour online (obvious mistake) and asked my mom to swing by the hardware store to pick it up for me (the store, which is close to my mom's house and not so close to our house, was having a big sale on paint). When I opened the can, it was hunter green. Which was not what I wanted. At. all. Luckily we were able to take it back to the store, where they added some more black. Phew (wipes brow).

Then, while we hummed and hawed about buying a ladder, it rained for two months and Adam had to listen to me start every conversation with sentences like, "Imagine how much better the house will look after I paint the shutters" and "I really can't wait for this rain to stop so I can paint the shutters" and "WHY HAS THE SUN FORSAKEN US? P.S. Still excited to paint those shutters."

Luckily, he's pretty patient. And frequently has an excuse to leave town with his band.

Anyway, it finally stopped raining, we bought a ladder (which Adam used to take down the ugly string of Christmas lights running along the front of the house), and I got started on painting the shutters. So far it's five down, three to go, but I had to share a little preview:

So. much. better. Up close, you can tell that they should really be replaced (I scraped and painted them without taking them down for fear that I wouldn't be able to put them back up again), which we fully intend to do, when we replace the windows. And speaking of the windows, unfortunately the newly-painted shutters make the peeling windows all the more obvious, so that's painting step two.