The Largest Thing You'll Ever Paint

I thought I had it all figured out picking the exterior colours of our house until we had to pick the roof colour so the roof restoration guys could start work.

Let's face it the roof is the largest thing you'll probably ever paint! It's such a big area and grabs a lot of attention so we were a bit stuck on the colour to pick.

Since the major works to the exterior of our home over the last 6 months the icing on the cake is to get the roof restored, at a cost of $5000 and 4 days work this job involves replacing all the cracked tiles, rebedding and pointing, new gulleys, pressure cleaning the roof tiles, and finally painting the roof tiles so you'll never notice the garage extension and the mix of orange tiles amongst it all.

So what colour roof paint should we pick? So far these are our exterior colours ... 

The front of the house and inside of the garage were rendered a sand stone colour

and then painted in Dulux exterior Classic Cream
(not Limestone as I wrongly picked the first time!)

The down pipes are Classic Cream so they blend with the side of the house

They are not a feature so we didn't want them to stand out in a different colour

The gutters and facias are Ironstone which is a charcoal colour with a blue tinge to it

it really plays up blue in the sunlight

We asked the roof restorer to drop off a few painted roof tiles for us to choose from and we have narrowed it down to:

Tile 1 on Left: Left half Charcoal Right half Monument

Tile 2 in Middle: Barramundi 

Tile 3 on Right: Ironstone

Something to remember with paint colours is the material the paint is on will also affect how it looks - the metal gutter absorbs the colour whereas the ceramic roof tile is painted with a glaze so reflects the colour

The Ironstone tile against the Ironstone gutter
(Yes these are the same colour but look quite different don't you think?)



The only solution was to put the tiles on the roof to see how they would look in real life.

As feared, the Ironstone on the roof tile was going to give us a blue roof which is not what we wanted.

The greys looked a bit too matchy matchy like we didn't quite get the colour tinted right.

So the one that gives us the best and brightest contrast was Charcoal.

The Charcoal ironically is almost the same as the original roof colour and gives us a sharp contrast against the Ironstone and the Classic Cream walls.
 

 

I was a little worried about the dark colour heating up with the sun, as it is almost black. Although the roof is insulated we decided to get a Whirly Bird as well which we'll install once the painting is done. Whirly Birds are great for circulating the air in the roof space of your house - we bought the Edmonds Windmaster from Bunnings $98.

I can't wait to show you what it looks like all repaired and painted ... it's going to look like a new house!

Next job is to get the garage door guys to remake our door the right size and install.

 

[All images my own]