White Farmhouse transformation

Hi friends! I have literally been itching to paint this house from the moment we moved in. It was November 2017, so it was too cold and rainy. My husband promised that we could paint in the Spring!

Here is the before picture. No character at all! A brown rectangle. We live on a small 5 acre farm. So I wanted a white farmhouse with black shutters! I thought how hard could it be to paint it ourselves. Only one story! So here is my little story and how to paint your house!

1. Pick a paint color

I bought about 5 paint samples and we finally decided on Alabaster White.

2. Tape everything off

I spent an entire day taping doors windows and hardware.

3. Invest in a sprayer

I knew that spraying it would be easier than hand brushing. So I went out and bought a $120 Wagner sprayer. This was the worst mistake I could have ever made!

Do not ever buy a cheap sprayer!!!!

I should have learned my lesson after I painted my kitchen cabinets. The cheap sprayer worked okay for that, but I threw it away when I was done.

Here’s what went wrong.

The sprayer was very heavy! And the paint cup was attached making it even heavier. So I would have to refill my paint supply every three minutes. ??

Then it was a nightmare to clean! After cleaning it once and trying to put it back together it would work. Then my husband tried to fix it and his strength literally broke it in half!

Well Ace Hardware was super nice and returned it for store credit, which was great because we needed more paint.

So we tried brushing and rolling for a day. Let me tell you I was in ? tears!! It was hot and horrible and took forever just to paint the garage door.

We decided we had to get a better sprayer. Here’s what we chose! And it was magical ????.

Once we got the new sprayer up and working it only took a day to paint it all! We did get a large stick roller and bankroll as we sprayed! That step is important. So when painting your house invest in a good one and make sure it has a hose to go in the bucket! Here are a few fabulous ones.

All in all we used 16 gallons of paint and could use a bit more, but we will touch up later!

At $200 for a 5 gallon bucket expect to spend anywhere from $600 and up just on paint! Our home is only one story and about 2000 sq ft for reference. The sprayer will cost over $200 for a good one! But it would have cost $5000 for us to hire someone. So we still saved $4000.

2. We built our own shutters. So I looked into ordering some and they were very expensive! We have about 10 large windows and at $100 per shutter it would have cost about $2000 for 2 shutters per window. So we decided to build them and it cost $6 per shutter? and they weren’t super hard.

We bought fencing wood. At $2 a piece from Lowe’s. My husband has a saw and cut them to size for me. But Lowe’s will cut them for you at .50 cents per cut! So nice! I did 3 boards wide (15″) per each large shutter. The bought a thinner piece for the cross pieces. When attaching the cross piece be sure to measure so each one is uniform. I did 8″ from the top and bottom.

I used my electric sander to sand them, because that fencing wood is pretty rough. Then I rolled on my paint color. I tried to spray paint them black but it turned out extremely blotchy! I recommend rolling. And use a flat paint!! We chose flat black.

3. Add garage hardware!

My absolute favorite part of this makeover was the garage!! For $15 we completely changed the look of the door. These are magnet hardware!

I also added some amazing lanterns that I already had. And the star! I tried to be very budget friendly and use what we had!

Eventually I’ll add gorgeous outdoor lighting and a huge wrap around porch, but that will be about $20,000 so we will wait a bit.

One thing I did to re use what we had was to paint existing pots and benches. These pots were red and came with the house.

I also added an amazing feature over the front door with a DIY.

See my bench makeover here.

I hope this was helpful! It really was a ton of work! So don’t attempt this unless you are prepared.