I had no idea how much prep works goes into this kind of painting project. Turns out you have to clean the entire exterior of your house first. We used a power washer very carefully. Our house is stucco, and we've heard horror stories about water coming into the house and ruining the walls if you use too much pressure with a power washer. Since re-doing every wall in the house wasn't at the top of our priority list we tried to avoid that at all costs.


One preventative step was to caulk all the cracks in the stucco. Fortunately, we have very few, but there are several doors and windows that were filled in at some point in the past. The cracks around the border are pretty obvious, so we used caulk to fill those babies in.




Then came hours and hours of scraping and sanding, trying to get every surface as paint-ready as possible. And then. FINALLY, it was time to paint!






We used a sprayer for both of the main house colors. This was an absolute lifesaver. Had we painted by hand we would probably still be painting (now. a year later) and there's no possible way it would make it onto our "favorite project" list. Our stucco is very textured which makes it hard to get into all the cracks and crevices with a brush or roller. If you do paint stucco/brick by hand we recommend finding the thickest nap roller you can. It'll help a lot!




But really, we just recommend using a sprayer. So much easier. Especially handy if your friend's dad owns one and let's you borrow it for weeks on end. I had never seen one of these before, much less used one. Fortunately, it's pretty easy. You just set the suction hose into the bucket of paint and you're off and running. It does take quite a while to clean out, and you have to clean it promptly so dried paint doesn't wreak havoc on the machine. We quickly learned to factor clean-up time into our painting days.




We opted to go for a three-tone look. We used a dark base on the brick, a really warm caramely neutral for the stucco, and then added a pop of color for the trim.


About halfway through said trim I was thinking we should have left it white. Thanks to the sprayer we flew through the brick and stucco but the trim was painstakingly slow. By the time we were done we agreed it was definitely worth it in the end.






And in the end? A not-so-ugly, no-longer-white house.






Here's a little before and after action to save you the trouble of scrolling up and down (am I the only one too lazy to do that??)