Front Primer and Colour Testing

We haven't made too much progress because of the holiday, but here are some photos of the front exterior, now primed:

There are a few more small details to be handled on the front, including some new sills, but the primer protects the wood as we get into the rainy season.

One place where there is still a bit of work is the window of the Accordion Room, which is over the front porch.

You can see the central shield piece still needs to be be resolved there, as I mentioned before. Fortunately it's super easy to get to this window even if the scaffolding isn't in place, because you can just step out the window onto the roof. It also turns out that is a really bad idea, because as it happens, the only thing holding up the porch roof are a few small pieces of trim and 150 years of paint. (We are fixing that, by the way.)

Here's an interesting little place where we have to make a guess about the trim:

The shadows of these diamonds were on the windows, but we have no idea what they were like because none of them remained on the house (every other piece that was missing was still on the house somewhere).

I think it is very likely that there was a button or lozenge of some kind in the middle of those diamonds. Just comparing them to the other similar pieces of ornament, and also seeing how button-happy Mr. Holt got while building this house.

Speaking of buttons, Woody suggested calling out the buttons with colour, and it looks interesting, but I'm not sure it's working for me overall:

For one thing, the bays turn out to be fairly white in the hierarchy of colour we already established, and then the buttons look like a bunch of random cherries in whipped cream.

I spent some time with Photoshop trying to come up with some additional detail, and we're going to do some experimenting over the next few days.

It's tedious and involves a lot of back and forth, but I don't know a better way to refine a colour scheme than seeing it in place.

posted by ayse on 11/25/17