The primer my husband used was Bins Primer, and he used a DuraCoat paint over that. It still isn't 100%, but looks good to my eye.
How did I discover the original paint colors? As I said there were parts of the house that were covered with the old lath/stucco period and those were under the asbestos shingles. As layers of coverings were removed there were parts of the old clapboard that had residual flecks and chips of the old paint that we discovered while preparing the surface. When you scrape the old siding you are up close and personal with it, it just takes a few minutes to really look at the layers to see the former colors. This is true when you work inside the house, also. In other houses and at other times I had scraped off old painted wall paper (now there is one really tedious job) and saw the decorating choices of generations past. It is interesting to get to know your house that way.
It was only on a small part of very sheltered area that we found that wheatstraw and brown combination. We saw whites and greeny blues that either were once deep greens or blues ( time and sun fades and changes point colors) and grays on the porches. Inside there were ochres ( seems like an old timey favorite color!) and grays under some truly horrible '70's choices. The living room was a chipped and cracked avocado green, acrid dark avocado green...nothing nice and mellow. I put up a deep red wall paper from the Waverly Red Lion collection at the time- I still like it - and it has held up remarkably well for all these years ( although my kids can be hard on things and a naughty boy or two who stood in a corner had pulled some of the paper off. I simply mixed up some watercolor paint in the requisite red and retouched. Amazing that you can't really tell the difference.... I wouldn't be so lucky if it had been a different style, but it was a very plain red with tiny cream diamonds in one of those regular patterns of the small patterned country papers. I am sort of ready for something different now, but I don't know what and I really don't want to "make work" at this point. We have been in projects non-stop for more than twenty years, now.
To think that when we moved here I had the idea that we would work on it for maybe five to ten years and then be done. It might have happened if we had not been caught in that flux of either having time and no money or money but no time circles so many times. Plus my husband went into sort of a cataonic state of remodeling for a little while- a few years or so. That can happen .... when the mind and heart just say " I quit" for awhile. He has since redoubled the effort in the past five years or so, and wished that some of his projects hadn't been put on hold. He loves having the kitchen as much as me...probably moreso, since he takes a craftsman pride in the outcome. But then, as he has said to me numerous times, "If I had known how hard the work was going to be I would never have attempted it". We joke a bit about that kitchen- if a tornado comes- the rest of the house might be blown to smithereens, but that kitchen will still be standing. Partially because my husband was more than a little enthusiastic about building those joists and beams to last a lifetime.
I think I have a pic scanned in with me and some of the kids hamming it up when part of the outside wall was gone .... let's see if I can find that.
Terrible quality picture, but it captured the moment. My how things have changed. We have a deck out side and the kitchen no longer has outside access, we moved that to the adjoining dining room where we took out two windows and put in a sliding door.
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