Park View, D.C.

With few exceptions, if you live in Park View, you live in a home that was built prior to 1925. As to updated interiors, there is a wide range of homes from those that are essentially pristine examples with few changes since the day they were built to examples that have been completely gutted and rebuilt.

One of the projects that many home owners go through, and one that is a struggle in my home, is painting — especially in choosing paint colors.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between the historic and modern, I try to refer to popular colors from when my home was built. This worked well two years ago when a color for the porch ceiling was needed. Living in a brown brick house with dark brown trim, traditional porch ceiling blue didn’t cut it. By referring to the Evercote paint samples from 1917, I noticed that the Dark Yellow worked well with the other colors on the home and it swayed me to use a yellow ocher.

So now that its time to paint the pantry — and after struggling with many, many paint samples — I decided once again to look at historic samples to see if I could get some inspiration. Again, there was an Eureka moment. Drawing from the Pea Green (below) and Leaf Green (above) samples, I was able to settle on a color very similar yellow-green hue.

(Aladdin Paint colors, 1916)

This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 7:01 am and is filed under Restoration repair and maintenance. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: home improvement, restoration