There are a number of reasons why we match paint colors on the exterior of our homes.
Sometimes when painting the entire exterior of our home we want to paint it the way that it was previously painted.
Or maybe the whole home does not necessarily need to be painted, but a part of it needs to be addressed (a small section that has peeled, one side that has not stood up as well as the other sides, etc.).
When attempting to match the “existing” color, the most important initial question to ask is whether you are trying to match what the color looked like the day the home was previously painted, or are you are trying to match it to the way that the color appears at the moment.
These are typically two entirely different topics.
For example, if you are trying to “touch up” an area of peeling paint that happened to peel for some reason a few years after the paint job was done and you use the color tinted straight from the paint store of what the color was when it was originally painted, there is probably going to be a noticeable difference when the paint has dried.
Even if you were to use a leftover, unopened gallon of paint from when the home was painted, the chances are that it is still going to be noticeable.
The reason for this is that any exterior paint job starts to “weather” the moment it dries and although the technology in today’s paint products allows the products to be more color-retentive than they ever have been, the longer a paint coating is exposed to the elements – even on the more weather-protected sides of the home – the greater the chance that touching something up with the original paint is going to stand out.
Obviously if you are repainting the entire outside of the home with the same color that it was previously painted with, this is not an issue as you will essentially be resetting the life of the paint job.
However, in instances when you are merely touching-up or painting a side of the home instead of the entire home, this could certainly be a challenge.
While this may seem like a bit of a head scratcher, the solution to get things as good as possible is actually fairly simple.
What we do when called upon to touch something up for a Client or just to paint a part of the home the same color it was previously painted with is we, literally, match the “weathered/faded” color directly either by grabbing a sample ‘chip’ of paint or borrowing a piece of siding or trim that has the color on it that we are working to match.
We then bring the sample to the paint store where we work directly with an expert color matcher at the store to match the sample that we brought in.
This is not always the easiest thing to do, and we work hard to look at the color in different lighting and approaches of that nature to truly get the best match that we can possibly get.
I myself have cumulatively spent hours of my life working with folks at our different paint suppliers to get a match “just right” for a Client.
Even though this exhaustive process is undertaken, there is still a chance the color may look slightly different from certain angles after it is applied.
This would be a matter of a newer product being observed next to an older product, though the color itself at this point should be dead on perfect.
Matching paint colors can absolutely be a pain in the rear.
Knowing the purpose of why the color is being matched and having an accompanying strategy to accomplish this task as best as can be done, should help to alleviate some degree of frustration by lessening the overall incongruency between paint colors when working to blend a paint in with the same color made and applied from two different points in time.
