Outside | Hicks House

Perhaps the most spectacular fail we’ve made since moving into our house was painting the door yellow. You may recall the house looking like this:

One thing is for sure, if you’ve ever driven down our street you sure couldn’t miss the house. (Not sure if that’s a good thing?) Needless to say it didn’t stand out in a GOOD way. The plan pretty much since the yellow paint was still wet was to repaint. Unfortunately I made this blunder on the last somewhat warm fall day. So we lived with it, all winter.

Spring arrived and I was practically chomping at the bit to repaint, but what color? I didn’t want to choose wrong again. We were also having more and more problems with the door sealing, something we noticed when we first moved in but never had addressed. So we brought it up with the builder who came over with a brand new door.

He took the old door off…

and put in a new door.

When he asked if we had anymore yellow paint, so he could paint it Ken and I pretty unanimously agreed that “We had run out, don’t worry about it, we’ll paint it.” NO MORE BRIGHT YELLOW DOOR.

So now we have this

Back to square one. Now the decisions start, do we want to stick with yellow but something more subdued like this (first photo) or this? Or are we too traumatized from the horror that was the first yellow?

The interior is much more geared towards gray and blue tones so maybe something light blue/teal like this, this or this, or this. There is also the gray option such as this, or this, but is that too ho-hum?

I’d love to know your thoughts! Please leave your color choice in the comments.

Yup you read that right, when we stained the deck, we also stained some sections of the house… oops. Sometimes despite the best preparation (we used plastic sheeting and tape to tape off the sections we thought would over spray) mistakes happen.

We obviously could not leave it like this. As its become summer we’re spending more and more time and eating more and more dinners out here and this was always taunting us:
I asked several handy people how to get it off and the general answer was “It’s stain – the whole purpose of it is to NOT come off.” Well that’s just peachy. Some suggestions were to try acetone, or mineral oil.

Ken tried the mineral oil and after several minutes of severe scrubbing he got the splatters into more of a light brown smear. Wah Wah – not good enough.

There had to be better way. Then he found this stuff (affiliate link) Motsenbocker’s Lift-Off – No. 4 Spray Paint Graffiti Remover, 22 oz. Trigger Spray
:

So we picked up some scrubbers and a handled dish brush from the dollar store and Ken donned some gloves and tried again. The bottle said not to leave it on the applied area for too long because it can oxidize and strip the color UNDER what you were trying to remove so don’t spray too big an area at once. Ken sprayed it down with the Liftoff and went over it with the scrubber.

For extra stubborn areas he used the plastic scrubber.

He didn’t even to press down or scrub that hard it just started coming off… almost like magic.

In order to wash it off after the scrubbing to ensure that it didn’t strip through our siding he then sprayed it down with Windex and wiped it off with a clean rag.

We were both in awe of how amazingly it worked. Not that I would recommend getting stain on your house but if it does happen at least there is a way to easily get it off.

So what do you think? Are you as impressed as we were? I’d love to hear about your DIY oopsies.