Obmezd---I just now got back to browsing this forum (busy landscaping, still!). Thank you for the compliments. I'm really loving the colors, too. Good thing since I agonized over them. The trim color was a color match to the garage doors since I wanted it to all look custom painted without actually having to paint the doors. I dread needing extra paint for repainting. I haven't looked yet to see how much is leftover for touchups, if needed. Guess I'd better make sure I have the formula to take to the paint store. It's obviously a creamy, off-white---much deeper than the SW Dover white that is my interior trim color. And, I got lucky that there was a gutter color that was almost a perfect match to the garage doors. I can find out the garage door mfgr for you if you like, and you can see their samples somewhere which would give you a "chip" to take to the paint store for a color match. The stone is Tennessee fieldstone. It was the least expensive stone at our stone yard. Funny how I didn't really like the sample wall at the stone place, but we didn't have it in the budget to do anything else (and wanted real stone). However, they'd gotten much better at cutting the stone in the years since they put up the sample wall, and so it turned out much better (neater looking) on my house. You mentioned painting a sample board. I would do a test on the actual house. Samples I liked on a board didn't look the same when I tried them on the house. Hope this helps. Good luck! Tracey

Groveraxle, thank you SO much for the renderings. How helpful. I really hadn't thought of green much but all this feedback is making me reconsider. And I agree that the lemonade porch ceiling should be a sky blue (for both tradition and the joy of it). Pennydesign, the green/blue pots are from the stoop on my last house. Previously I had potato vine (which does well here), coming through the gumdrop shaped metalwork top pieces. I picked them up at a garage sale, long ago, and they seem to be designed to be part of a hanging plant but are so huge, I never got around to hanging them anywhere. So I stuck them on those pots to give them some presence. I've also wound lights around them in the winter to highlight the gumdrop look. I put them there when I moved just to sort of mark the path but they don't have to live there. This year I've been so busy with other house projects (all the boring and costly system stuff) that I haven't planted anything so maybe they look silly?

I like the look of it for your office building. It works with the dark accents already in place. Best wishes!

Semi-transparent stain generally isn't very durable as deck stain. It's most often used for vertical surfaces. It also isn't very long lasting on sunny surfaces. If you are going to stain the deck, your best bet may be deck stain!