Building With Bay West Homes

The journey of building a new house...

Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Ashley talked about the colours below, but I wanted to show you a few of the houses we looked at when trying to decide what we wanted in a house colour. The most important advice I can give to other home-builders about this stage is to spend some time looking at houses around you. You'd be surprised at what you'll notice! When I started looking at the exterior of houses, I was startled at how varied they were in subtle ways. Each house is an expression of the person who builds it, so this shouldn't be too surprising.



Having a digital camera was incredibly helpful in this part of the process - it's impossible to remember all the details on the houses we saw. I have a Canon Powershot S110 Digital Elph, one of the smallest digital cameras on the market. The tiny size makes it easy to carry with me wherever I go, and it's quick to take out and grab a shot when we saw something we liked. When we were discussing colours later, it was great to look at the pictures of the houses we saw and pick and chose from what other people did.

Now let's take a look at three of the houses that had colour schemes we liked...



This house had a really nice blue trim with wide siding. The blue was really attractive, but we both felt it might date itself in a few years.



This was our runner-up for house colour choices...there's something I find tremendously appealing about burgundy. It's somehow regal looking, yet soothing at the same time. We looked at pairing it with a sandy colour (unlike this photo which had white). Ultimately, we opted for another colour scheme.



This was the winner! It seemed a little strange to me that after looking at so many houses and colour swatches, we ended up picking two "non colours" for our house. Ashley and I have a very specific vision for the interior of the house, and I wanted the exterior to compliment that vision. Black and white - classy, crisp, sharp, simple, focused. I like black and white photos more than I like colour ones, so this shouldn't be a surprise.