We finally finished painting the exterior!!!

Well. . . almost. . . We've still got a bit of patching up to do, but on the whole, we're nearly there.

Phil and I painted the whole house with the blue gel undercoat, then bagged (texture-painted) the greatest part of the house with the grey Taubmans Moroka (which looked a little more brown in the sample pot than it does on the walls). We finally pulled our combined fingers out on the weekend and painted the pillars on the alfresco - Surfmist - to match the facias and eves. . . lucky the downpipe that runs down the back of the closest pillar wasn't properly nailed to the brick, we were able to prise it back and prop it out of the way and paint underneath it. . . thank ye gods! Phil thinks that the downpipe in question looks pretty stupid, being so dark against the white surface. .. but I don't care. . . it's staying! (And I really don't mind it). They put the downpipes on after we'd done the bulk of the painting, so this was the only one we had to fart around with.

Here's a view of the garages. . . we have yet to finish painting around the garage doors, as the garage-door-men came to fit them on the morning that we were going to paint there. . . bugger. . . we should be able to pull them up and out of the way when they're fully fitted (which they aren't at the moment), so we'll finish off this bit of the painting then. I absolutely LOVE our aqua blue garage side-door. . . it'll be the same colour as the roof, downpipes and garage door when we're finished (hopefully)

View from the back of the house

View from the front of the house. . . we painted the portico (front pillars) surfmist (white) at first. . . no good. . . then we put on a coat of the grey Moroka . . . very bland (we knew it would be, but we just needed the texture so we could paint over it with normal matt masonry paint. . . much cheaper!) . . . then we tried painting it dark brown (my idea. .. was trying to bring a bit of warmth to the exterior . . . no good. . . so Phil gave me his proposal. . . I could choose all the colours for the inside of the house, if he could choose the colour for the portico. . . ohhhh . . . hmmmm . . . OK!!! So we painted it the same colour as the roof. . . Monument! Looks alright!!!

Windows have a brick border around them, which is painted in Surfmist. We're going to paint the area around the front door a bit of a lighter grey, as the front door is to be a really dark brown and will just get lost in all that darkness if we don't do something (so we think).

And here's the view from the top of the hill. . .