cimorene

waxjism and I share the same favorite color, green. (Although green is tied for aqua with me and it kind of depends on the circumstances.) This makes it pretty easy for us usually when we pick things out because we just both gravitate to the greenest one with few exceptions. Our mutual favorite house in the neighborhood is this beautiful Arts & Crafts-influenced traditional Finnish wood house a block away next to the library, in forest green with white trim (this house is actually too big for me, but era and stylewise is my ideal house pretty much):

Our house, however, Knypplinge, was bought with a recent and still very good-looking coat of paint on its stucco in a light yellowish cream with white trim.

The house is a 1950 postwar reconstruction pattern house (the rintamamiestalo or frontman's house, built around the country diy-style from free patterns put out by the government, now a recognizable cultural classic that exists in thousands all across the country) and while the stucco finish is a bit less usual - the house is wood underneath - the colors for a house of this style and period are extremely typical. I looked for historical house color info, but stucco in this period is pretty exclusively light pastel colored and cream/white is by far the dominant color, with white trim the only option even mentioned at the historical paint color resources I found. Even though when we bought the house we were saying we could improve it by adding a darker accent at the windows, after this research we reluctantly gave in on the white. Until recently when I noticed that the white on some of the windows is obviously painted over a darker color, though I couldn't tell what color... and then yesterday I found this paging through Att Förstå Ett Gammalt Hus: Vårt åbolandska byggnadsarv [Understanding an Old House: Our Åboland Building Heritage]!

This is the old post office building on the island of Korpo in the archipelago, a couple of ferry rides away from here but now officially part of the town of Pargas. The building is probably older than the stucco, which the book says was applied by a Russian stuccoer in the early 1900s. It has a very similar body color to our house and the same red tile roof, although the window trim is larger and more ornate, and the green trim looks great on it and provides a clear precedent for us. I showed this picture to Wax immediately and we got all excited and decided to eventually paint the trim and doors all green like this. Then we went outside in the yard and while poking at some peeling paint on the metal hand rails up the steps to the stoop and the metal trim on the outside of the window beside the door, we found two colors of robin's-egg blue paint and a warm yellowy forest green! The original trim color on the house was a bright turquoise robin's egg, followed by a slightly more muted/darker classic robin's egg, followed by the forest green, and then eventually the white. (I love robin's egg blue, but Not Like That.)

So we have the firmest foundation possible for taking the trim back to forest green, and the freestanding boatshed/'garage' building behind the house (which is currently literally a different color on each of its four sides for some reason - faded too-blue green, faded reddish baby poop brown, light yellow and darker brown, and a fifth more normal brown color on the pediment!). I want to paint the front door as soon as possible after the interior is done - so next summer or spring probably - and the windows are all in need of some painstaking restoration, so I'll have to tackle those one at a time after we've moved in over there. Repainting the foundation and eaves can wait longer.

We have a further problem in that our house is two houses, with the mother-in-law wing grafted onto the side being a long, narrow, standard 1970s architectural style with a tin shed roof over asbestos-cementatious side shingles, so it clashes with the main house in every way. In the long term, it really should have a peaked roof and wooden siding appropriate to 1950 put on it, but who knows if that will ever be affordable or not. It's the same color as the stucco, which is another problem; the colors appropriate for stucco aren't the colors appropriate for wooden siding (which is what the asbestos shingles do badly pretend to be after all). I think in the medium term, like when the paint on that side needs refreshing anyway, the best thing would be to paint it a contrast color and at least try to modify the exterior trim a bit. Perhaps putting the trim green on the shingles would be a bit too much, but dark green is a traditional color for wooden houses in Finland at least.