Homeowner’s Guide: Exterior Paint Colors

Choosing the best exterior paint color for your home should be fun…in theory.

In reality, you often end up standing in your driveway with your nosy neighbor, staring at 15 splotches of color on your siding and wondering why that gray looks blue, that beige looks pink, and that white looks yellow.

The problem? Your home’s best color doesn’t live in a vacuum. It has to coordinate with your brick, stone, roof, windows, driveway, and all those other fixed, bossy finishes that aren’t going anywhere soon or are expensive to replace.

And when those finishes don’t all coordinate perfectly? You need to know which ones matter most, which ones your paint color needs to answer to, and which ones can stop running the show.
Because choosing the wrong exterior paint color isn’t just annoying. Being paint, supplies, scaffolding, and possibly paying professionals, changing your mind once you’ve painted your whole home can get expensive – fast.

This is where this guide comes in.

Using REAL HOME EXAMPLES, I’ll walk you through how to choose your home’s main paint color, with a dose of humor (okay, maybe a few doses and Mimosas), in a practical way that’s easy to understand and actually use on your home.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to…

• Choose a main paint color that works with your home’s existing finishes.
• Coordinate paint colors with brick, stone, roofing, windows, and more.
• Decide which finishes and features should take priority – even when they aren’t exactly playing nicely together.
• Understand how north, south, east, and west-facing exposures can affect a home
• Avoid common color mistakes that can make a palette look disconnected, clashy, or just plain wrong.
• Rule out colors that don’t make sense before wasting time and money sampling them.
• Narrow your options down with confidence
• Stop rage-buying another 8 sample pots of colors that may or may not work

When choosing the best color for an ENTIRE HOME, ‘I think this one looks good’ only gets you so far as the first few swipes of the roller. You need to understand what your home is asking for, and once you do, that giant pile of possibilities gets a heck of a lot smaller.

This isn’t a list of the ‘best exterior paint colors’, as the ‘best color’ is the one that suits your home. Instead, you’ll learn how to look at YOUR brick or stone, YOUR roof, YOUR windows, and YOUR home as a whole so you can understand what colors make sense, and confidently throw the others in the burn pile.

Whether you’re repainting an outdated exterior, working around finishes you can’t change, or creating a color palette from scratch, the goal is the same: less guessing, fewer samples, and a lot more confidence before gallons and gallons of paint go on your home.

Because the best exterior paint color isn’t necessarily the trendiest one, or the one that looked amazing on the house down the road. It’s the one that actually works with YOUR home.