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Final Grading and Painting the Exterior – Episode 14 & 15 of Building a Farmhouse

Hello there! It’s so nice to be going through these episodes now and getting to the good stuff in construction. The closer I get to decorating the house the more excited I get. But the fact of the matter is that there is so much practical and necessary work that has to be done before you ever get to that phase.

If you have missed any of the previous posts about our build, you can catch up on all of them in our Building a Farmhouse series.

One of the things I was most excited about was painting the house. I always wanted, but never had a white house. However, this was not going to happen until we got all of the grading done around the house first.

See, when we built the foundation, a lot of dirt had to be removed to level out the area where we put our slab down. Now that the structural build is complete we need to put the dirt back to level the ground and make it look like the earth surrounding our house was that way all along.

SOME OF THE FOLLOWING LINKS ARE AFFILIATE LINKS. PLEASE SEE FULL DISCLOSURE FOR COMPLETE DETAILS

So in came truck after truck full of dirt in order to build the ground back up and make it more level to the house. As they brought it in, they spread it out and then compacted it so that it would remain in place.

The backyard needed quite a bit of dirt and we needed to make sure it was completely flat, since we planned on putting up a pool in this area for the kids to enjoy.

The driveway also needed a ton of dirt since we planned on adding a concrete pad just outside the garage doors so that we had a place to park the cars and the kids also had a place to play basketball etc.

After all of that was done, it was finally time to paint the house. I knew when I went in that I wanted it white. I chose the color Alabaster from Sherwin Williams, because even though it is a white, it’s not so stark as a bright white.

This was probably one of the coolest things to watch in real time. Painting it was satisfying, but to see the painter walk from ladder to ladder as the rest of the workers adjusted and moved them while he was painting the second story was really fascinating and sometimes nerve-wracking. Don’t worry, no one was hurt.

The entire process took about a week and part of it was prepping the surface, like putting plastic up on the windows and cleaning off the siding so the paint would stick.

I chose one color for the entire house and I even kept all of the trim the same color as well. I really didn’t want to break up the white and since this house is supposed to look like a classic farmhouse I wanted to keep things simple.

After the exterior was painted, it was time to paint the posts and the tongue and groove. I didnt’ want a really stark dark color for the stain. Instead I was leaning towards something warm that would hide the yellow tones and age nicely. I chose this color for my stain and I don’t regret it. It looks just as I had hoped!

This only took 2 days to complete and it was so nice to see the difference.

The posts will most likely need to be touched up a couple of times a year as the sun hits them pretty hard and we want to make sure they stay protected. The porch ceilings are protected from both the sun and rain so this won’t be necessary for them.

I do love how rich the wood looks now with the white exterior as the background. Everything is nice and clean and crisp.