Porch
When we bought our house, built 1914-1917, I saw a pale gray band at the top, yellow-orange bricks, and a fussy pale gray porch. "Doesn't work," I announced to my husband, who learned to dread questions of color the day I rattled off the name of every crayon in the 64-box with built-in sharpener.
I started grabbing Victorian and Arts & Crafts booklets, historic-house brochures, sample palettes, and individual swatches from paint stores, sliding them surreptitiously into a tote bag. They were free, but my rapaciousness scared me. I studied, I skimmed...and in the end, I abandoned precise historical authenticity and started dealing out colors that felt like the house.
How many would I need?
"Just one different color, for contrast," a friend advised me. Lovely, so simple. A nice dark green. But if I made the railing the contrasting color, what about the brackets? and the little balls on the posts? And shouldn't I make the little ridges a different color? And I had to match the door...and the brick...
I sacrificed a glossy exterior's durability for the softer historic look of a satin finish and exploded my budget by getting top of the line paint so we'd never have to do all this itsy bitsy stuff again. The masking tape and guide rules? Lasted about 45 minutes. Then I just got a smaller brush and went freehand.
The real painter did the high work, painting the band at the top of the house a nice dark green--with cream rectangles of trim inside. I'd never even noticed those rectangles when they were gray on gray. When he heard me whoop, he came down from his high ladder and walked me around back to show me the elegant diamond shape just below the roof, and the little stars, and the scrollwork. He painted the
brackets under the roof brick-red but left them cream inside the openwork, so the carving popped.
I now had three colors going--dark green, cream and brick red. So I added a pumpkin orange just for fun. I painted the railing and then moved toward one set of carved balls on the columns. Surely now I need to do the ones at the top, too? And maybe the little strip under the bracket should be orange, to mix the colors more?
There are no 12-step programs for gingerbread painters. I called an artist friend. "Pick out what you want to emphasize," she said, "and let the rest recede into the background, or else you'll have so much detailing, your eye won't know where to look."
Like any recovery, it's easier said than done.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
