Exterior issues: Using paint to refresh the outside of your home

There always seems to be somewhere in the house that needs painted – if it’s not painting bedrooms, it’s glossing skirting boards or painting over pen marks on the walls. So the outside of the house tends to get forgotten about.

We have lived in our current house for four years, and one of the things that attracted us to it was that it is easy to maintain. As you can see from the pictures it is a bungalow, so good for my husband who doesn’t like heights, and quite a bit of the exterior is brickwork which doesn’t need painting.

But as I said, we have been here four years and it really was time to paint the outside of the house. As anyone who had done a bit of painting knows, cheap paint is a false economy. You end up having to buy much more paint in order to get the job done and this of course means extra coats and more time spent painting.

So when Crown Paint offered us the opportunity to review its paints we were very happy to do so. If you could ever get away with cheap paint on the inside I don’t think you can on the outside of a house. And since it had taken us four years to get round to painting the house we wanted to do things properly.

Outside house makeover using Sandtex exterior paints

Here’s a photo of the driveway and the side of the house before it was painted. As you can imagine, that garage door gets some knockings from basketballs and footballs being thrown against it.

We used Sandtex 10 year exterior satin paint for the garage door and for the bottom of the house. The colour was bay tree and it is a stronger green than it looks on the tin.

For the rest of the house we used Sandtex Ultra Smooth Masonry Paint in magnolia.

For the guttering and pipes we used Sandtex One Coat exterior gloss paint in pure brilliant white.

Here is the end result:

Here is a close up of the side of the house. It shows you how much it needed doing:

And here it is afterwards. I am sure you will agree it is much better!

The front of the house is mostly brickwork but here is a before picture anyway:

And here is it afterwards:

We were pleased with the quality of all the paints, and with the end results. My husband and I both prefer Crown paints to cheaper brands and this confirmed to us that it is worth paying just that little bit more for a reliable finish.

Product review by Jackie Cosh

(Disclosure: The paints for this review were supplied by Crown Paints, but all views and experiences are those of the reviewer).

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